Vincit Omnia Veritashttps://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com
Truth Conquers AllFri, 27 Feb 2015 14:06:41 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/3a03dd449efc3fb7a6ac2f28afe483eb?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngVincit Omnia Veritashttps://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com
wordpress/yGSuhttps://feedburner.google.comThe Conversation We Need on Warhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/UIqcPJQQO0k/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/the-conversation-we-need-on-war/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 14:00:56 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=9004]]> This is not a post I wish to write for a lot of reasons. Mostly it has to do with the fact that I recognize that my opinions here are not in line with the average American and that I have loved ones and friends who will and have disagreed with me in part or in whole. I don’t wish to insult, cause pain, or infuriate those I care about, but important issues do not benefit from pretending they don’t exist.

This all started, or should I say restarted for me with an editorial I read in the NYTimes yesterday which I urge you to read carefully here. It refers to the fact that some veterans really don’t appreciate being thanked for their service and that opens a whole can of worms for me.

Because this promises to be long, and you deserve to understand from whence my opinions germinated, let me go back to the beginning.

War is not something new of course but is as old as human relationships. As we gathered into groups, we inevitably? found war as the way to solve issues between groups. I question the word inevitable since the jury is still out as to whether we are innately prone to solve our problems this way or not. Suffice it to say, we’ve taken the easy way out, the simplistic approach since we began to record our lives as “civilized”.

I am of that generation whose grandfathers were eligible to fight in the “war to end all wars” and our fathers fought in the conflagration known as WWII. Those were both “righteous” wars by all accounts, fought from a necessity we all accepted. My father was a WWII vet and so was my closest uncle. I assumed, without actual knowledge that all of my friends fathers were veterans too. I to this day don’t know which were and which weren’t.

The generation of my father did not talk much of war, it was indeed their overarching psyche not to. My father did not belong to veterans groups for the most part. But the country did take its responsibility to take care of its vets very seriously. The GI Bill followed quickly at the end of the war, and that was accompanied by a social security law that ensured a decent old age. Unions rose dramatically in the years following and with them came salaries that paid a living wage, and pensions to bolster that social security. Veterans once in positions of power made sure their health care needs were met with Medicare in the sixties.

These efforts, directed at least in large part to show our thanks to veterans was shared by most people and embraced. Republicans lagged behind in these efforts, but even they soon were loath to not support them as well. Such happens as the result of righteous wars.

This is what it meant to “support our troops” back then.

I grew up watching war movies, at least until about the age of 15 or so. I had no particular feelings about war other than that they were sometimes necessary and that that men did some scary stuff that I was glad not to do.

Vietnam was “my” war in that I came to adulthood during it. Quickly we came to realize that it had none of the clean lines of demarcation. From the beginning it was mired in questions. It would take years if not decades before we saw it clearly. America had been on the wrong side. Ho Chi Minh was in fact the hero, and America had been propping up a corrupt puppet government that as usual was supported for “doing our bidding.”

We would go on to do similar if less costly (to us) interventions in South America.

I ended up by the time I was nineteen or so supporting draft dodgers and draft card burners and marching on an occasion or two to stop this war. I read books about war, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, and Aristophanes Lysistrata. Later I read Colonel David Hackworth’s About Face: The Odyssey of An American Warrior.

I was forever changed in my opinions regarding war. I see them today as but temporary fixes that contain the seeds of new wars, and that this posture is endless. I see them as the easy solution when we are not brave enough nor thoughtful enough to do better.

I don’t pretend to be a total pacifist for I recognize that unbridled naked aggression must be met with more than words. But at the same time I’m not sure what the standards should be for determining “just” war. I do believe it should be the last resort rather than the first. I recognize as well that no soldier can hide behind “orders” to justify his/her behavior in a war theatre and thus don’t buy the “war is hell, never question what they did.”

We live in a polarized time where some try to reserve patriotism to themselves. They do this by defining some rather strange things as patriotic. It ends up being words more than behavior in my opinion. Sarah Palin explained to us that people who don’t wear flag pins aren’t patriotic. That is surely an opinion I suppose, but hardly one I want to identify with.

Politicians all wear flag pins, and often spout the words “support our troops”. Plenty of people fly flags as if this is patriotism. If you know me you know I do not relate to any of this.

Borders seem artificial constructs of humans designed to preserve resources mostly. In my view, the future can only result in a remove of such artifices and the institution of policies that favor use of shrinking resources for the benefit of all humanity. World government must inevitably replace nation states.

Thus to me, reliance on archaic terms such as national pride and homeland and so forth serve only to point out our differences rather than seek our commonality. Supporting our troops, more the banner of the politician, ends up being nothing more than a call for a larger army with more armaments. I find it all decidedly unhelpful in a world that shrinks daily and becomes more intricate.

During my war crisis (Vietnam) we knew that most of the boys sent to fight the designated enemy were not there by choice. The draft is no more, at least not now, and so perforce I must admit that all soldiers are soldiers by choice today. But they are far from being all the same.

Some are there through a genuine desire to “fight for our way of life and to avenge those who kill Americans.” I can appreciate their actual belief, however short-lived it may be, as heartfelt. One can, I suppose, thank them for their belief, however wrong it may be to some of us.

Some are there because life circumstances offers them little in terms of a future. Poor boys and girls find themselves with few options to a better life, and the service has always held out that carrot of education and training as a way out of poverty.

Some were raised in the tradition or not, but feel that all things being equal, this is a good career choice. And that of course is their right.

Others are there because the other option was jail.

I am told, but do not know, that in the midst of battle, soldiers fight not for country or “so that you don’t have to” but solely for each other, as the series Band of Brothers pointed out so well. Such emotions are no doubt noble and right to those who face death.

But since I am not of the persuasion that most wars are necessary, and certainly not these wars of late, I find myself in some quandary about what this thanks is for. Why should I thank the one who deliberately chose to do this thing that I do not agree with? For in the end, wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq arguably have made life here in the US more dangerous rather than less so. Simply the number who hate us has grown exponentially.

There is a movie I believe called What if They Gave a War and Nobody Came? It became a popular slogan during Vietnam. One must ask, what if? It might be that the government would re-institute the draft, but Vietnam proved how powerful a populace can be when it sets its mind against the will of a warmongering government. So is it not legitimate for me to argue that you have no right to expect my thanks for doing what I deem ultimately doing more harm than good, both to my country and to untold other human beings?

Why should I thank you for doing what you chose to do for your own interests (which I may or may not sympathise with) and which harms what I perceive as legitimate goals of this country?

And who are you to complain of me? The ones who will most vociferously are those who wave flags, wear pins, and speak of supporting our troops. You are also the same ones who support your local congressperson in voting no for food stamps, improvements in the VA and veterans benefits and unemployment benefits. Yet, significant percentages of veterans need food stamps, and they comprise something like twenty-five percent of our homeless. The VA is unable to adequately care for the tens of thousands who return wounded or who like my husband retain injuries not obvious to the casual observer. Yet you do not “support” them in these tangible ways.

So please save your criticism and look in the mirror at your own failings. As the writer of the NYTimes editorial said, you can’t get off the hook for you utter lack of being involved in war by such a simple trite means. Face the fact that unless you or yours was an actual soldier, you haven’t suffered one second for all this killing, and you haven’t thought about it either, other than to issue forth your platitudes.

Some of us bewail this killing, and the victims are not only Americans but Afghanis and Iraqis just for starters. The list gets longer as we have to also bear some responsibility for the killing done by Middle Eastern peoples to each other because of our meddling throughout the region. And we sit in our homes and schools and places of work and dine on steak and watch football, and all the other niceties of life in America while millions suffer for what is being done in our name and in the name of those we support.

We have reaped the whirlwind and now face a group of men and women who have no fear of dying to bring about an ideology they believe in no matter how insane it actually is. And if we don’t come to some equally compelling ideology to counteract it, we will find ourselves ill-equipped to save humanity from itself.

It is clear what the war hawks are selling. It’s what they have sold since the days of Thermopylae. The question is will we ever see beyond the spear, the catapult, the tank, the bomb and the sniper?

I’m not asking you to agree with me. I’m asking you to dialogue. This is the human conversation that needs to be held. I am offering no solutions because I don’t have them. But I do believe that we owe it to our children and their children to make the attempt.

All I can do is promise a veteran this: I will honor every dead man and woman killed by war. I will vote for every improvement in VA services and benefits. I will do my best to find real solutions to hunger and housing, and will vote AND PAY TAXES to support public assistance to all in need. I will vote in elections to support peaceful solutions over war. And I honestly truly am deeply sad for your suffering whether it is apparent to all or hidden in the recesses of your mind. I will be a voice for the voiceless. I will seek to help make all boats rise.

Rudy 9/11 Giuliani opens his gums and spouts off as to how this President, really doesn’t love America as we do. Rude then goes on to explain that Obama was raised “diff-rent” from you and me, and none of that stuff is racist cuz ya know he had a white mama.

Rather than pick apart the blatherings of a has-been irrelevant hack, let’s look at the whole concept of what it means to “love one’s country.”

I’m not sure exactly what it means myself. I have no idea what it means to love a thing like that. I mean the concept is quite foreign to me, and I suspect it is to most people of they were pushed to tell exactly what they meant by it. Most people work from metaphor, taking it to mean that they support what the country was framed to stand for, and they think voting is a requirement of good citizenship.

I am not a boundary person you see. I look at maps and say, “oh dear, that makes no sense. Why is that line there?” Most of that stuff arose from long ago times and most dealt with wars. A bit of it is due to natural features of the land. Most of the lines throughout the Middle East are arbitrary and stem from meddling from the West, and truth be told, it’s why things are in such turmoil there today.

I do love humanity, which I think is quite natural being a part of it. I figure I’m one of the lucky ones, and I figure I’m no more entitled than anybody else. The accident of birth landed me in a land that allows me to pretty much do as I wish and do it fairly pleasantly. Someone’s being born in Bangladesh should entitle them to no less. So I’m all for making things a lot more equal. I’ll happily give up some if I can improve the lives of people who have almost nothing.

I recognize everyone doesn’t believe like I do, because they have been raised by parents, governments, businesses, and media to “want it all” with fine phrases like “work ethic” and “bootstraps” and “survival of the fittest”, to name but a few. They deserve more because they work harder and they judge their value and others by what’s in the garage of life.

If ever a metaphor was made for the GOP it’s the black hole. The GOP is on the event horizon. That’s the spot on the edge of a black hole from which there is no return. Destruction is inevitable since the gravitational pull is stronger than any known counter force to pull out. Yet to the observer, the person or thing poised on the event horizon seems to remain there forever. It’s basic astrophysics.

Or one can use the analogy of catch 22. Either works fine.

You see the GOP is always damned either way at this point. It is all of their own making, so there is no desire to rescue them. They are caught in the black hole of the tea imbibing community of dunces. They must feed the tiger lest the tiger eat them alive which of course it inevitably will since one must go mad under that sort of pressure eventually, and thus falter and succumb to the fangs.

The GOP cannot get away from the tea crazies. So they invariably make remarks such as Rudy did. And the Walkers of the party will continue to be non-committal in rejecting such tripe. One cannot poke the tiger, after all. Meanwhile, they remain mired in place at the event horizon while in reality, bit by bit they are eaten alive.

There is no meaning to “loving my country” any more than there is to “supporting our troops”, wearing flag pins or saying loudly that America is Exceptional! Similarly, the idea that one must confess one’s Christianity in order to be viable is without merit. The latter particularly is egregious, since there is a no religious test clause in the very constitution that these flag wavers so profess to be willing to die for.

In reality, constitution protectors don’t really mean it at all. They mean the constitution as they interpret it, and with the parts left out that they don’t like.

Do you love your country or only the ideal of it? Do you love it in spite of its true history or do you doctor that up to meet some standard you have erected to satisfy your personal needs and wants? I read where one woman in talking to her right-wing relatives learned that they opposed the current state of teaching American history because it “just wasn’t necessary to rehash all that old stuff. Sure slavery was bad, but we ended it. We should concentrate on what makes America great.”

Does anybody have a clue where that sort of nonsense leads? Well, not to go into that of course, but it does, you have to admit, lead to all sorts of entitlements based on “we’re just so damned superior” and “you can’t manage without our guidance.” Anyone smell the odor of Arian purity and world domination in there?

President Obama has less than two years left to serve, and the Republican day care school replacement brigade still can’t talk of much else. Meanwhile it would appear that Jebbie hasn’t read a newspaper in six-plus years, since a big chunk of his foreign policy team is made up of his brother’s fine collection of idiots that led us into the morasses of both Afghanistan and Iraq. He doesn’t know that Wolfowitz was one of the architects of the Iraq policy with his pre-emptive strike crap? He doesn’t know that along with Cheney and others, the Iraq foray was something these fools had wanted to do for a decade or so and found 9/11 a good excuse for? They are liars and arguably war criminals if we collectively had the stomach to clean up our own shit behind us.

Yet this is where we live today. In a world steeped it seems in a party which is caught between the tiger which is devouring it, and reality which it can only spit niceties at as it throws yet another bone in the other direction. Stop being the party of stupid, Bobby Jindal said, while being stupid. We welcome everyone, except not Log Cabin Republicans to CPAC. I’ll take a pass on that evolution question if you don’t mind, I’m not a scientist.

We live in a world where David and Charles Koch, family owners of Koch Industries, owners of subsidiary ALEC, writes the legislation word for word of the bill their CEO Scott Walker of their other subsidiary Wisconsin, signs into law regarding “right to work” (which is really nothing but right to work for next to nothing), causing even old timer Republicans who still have some shred of decency left in them, to say, “this is just fucking wrong.”

Is this love of country? They would surely say yes, the country they want to have, wherein all decisions are filtered through the prism of “is this good for the bottom line?”

Love my country?

Only an insane person would love this. Place that constitution, the preamble will do, against the fabric of stupid today and see how well that fits. A person could stand on a stump and recite non-stop this bundle of crazy for weeks without end. Today, we will pass a law that says sex education must never allude to the possibility of enjoyment but only procreative elements that are of course abstained from by good little girls, and winked at by bad little boys. Today we will ban yoga pants, cuz damn I wanna do what’s right for Merika. Today I’ll suggest that good education money is wasted on them blacks who just collect welfare anyway. Today, I’ll work hard to make sure only “our sort of folk” can vote. Today, I’ll cash that check from Exxon-Mobile and vote to let them drill baby drill in your fucking front yard.

Love my country?

Are you serious?

Filed under: Brain Vacuuming, Crap I Learned, crap I learned but wish I hadn't, GOP, Humor, Satire, Sunday Editorial, teabaggers Tagged: American Exceptionalism, GOP insanity, love of country]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/metaphors-and-analogies-galore/feed/6spiritmeadowlove_my_country_500https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/metaphors-and-analogies-galore/Anti-Vaxxers and Their Troubled Logichttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/LEidPV_2m_Q/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/02/15/anti-vaxxers-and-their-troubled-logic/#commentsSun, 15 Feb 2015 16:19:39 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8995]]> I’m not one to shrink from controversy and when I weighed in on this issue, I did it knowing full well that it would probably go exactly where it did.

Anti-vaxxers as they have become known introduce yet another instance of retrograde civilization at work. The group it hails from is a shocking one in some respects–the upper middle, and supposedly well-educated.

While those on the liberal left have a healthy dose of scepticism when it comes to big Pharma, the anti-vaxxers have as Keegan Michael Key would say, have “taken it to a whole ‘nuther level”.

A person on Facebook posted something about her conclusion that vaccinations ought to be a matter of choice. I’d reproduce that statement accurately, but she’s taken down the entire thing as best I can tell, so I cannot. She expounded in at least one or two additional comments.

I suggested that if she had a right to choose then of course schools had the right to choose not to allow her kids in the building which would force her to homeschool. Additionally this could also lead to groups (I would suggest organized sports and artistic groups) to banning children who could not provide vaccination records as well. Other parents might well determine that their children were unsafe in her children’s company.

All told, I argued, that such restrictions as might reasonably be placed upon her children might so segregate her children from the rest of society that some people might suggest that that amounted to child abuse.

She responded by private message, telling me this:

I deleted your comment. Child abuse? My kids have had some vaccinations, but I’m done with the bs of infecting others and fear. It DOES need to remain a choice. If vaccines become forced, what’s next? I’ve worked with too many vaccine injured children/people to know otherwise. No human life is above another. I’m all for a good debate/conversation, but have no more patience for inflammatory responses.

I was not permitted to answer the message. I tried to go to her page and was advised “no such person can be found” the telltale sign of being “unfriended.”

I wrote this on my Facebook wall:

hahaha, unfriended by a woman who took offense that I indicated that her “choice” not to vaccinate her children impinged on the choice of other children who came in contact with hers. She sent me a message saying she deleted my comment as “inflammatory” and then of course unfriended me in revenge. As I expected she would…..How can some people be so incredibly selfish…She seemed offended that anyone might suggest that she would have to homeschool her kids and keep them from others to protect other children and that some people might call that child abuse…Beware of (name omitted)

I received the following messages from her during the evening:

Really?

Your post about me was both inaccurate and untrue. Sorry you feel that way.

Why would you post that? Most of it is not even true.

Expected no answer. . Meaningful discussion is too scary? You’d rather slam me on Facebook? Maturity? I considered responding, but why? I’m not angry.? I’m not against vaccines. I’m for choice. I’m not the one who is offended. What you choose is fine.

The last is rich indeed. Is it I too scared to confront? I did not delete your comment lady, nor block you from replying any way you wished.

But let’s get to the meat of your argument.

“I’m not against vaccines” Apparently you are, since you said “my kids have had some [emphasis added] vaccinations.

“I’m for choice.”

Have you even spent once single moment examining that? I mean, yes, choice just sounds right doesn’t it? Choice is always a better word than “required, compelled, ordered. So I do get it. A lazy mind would always prefer choice to any of those.

What does it mean in actuality?

It means you can make a meaningful decision that is rational and based on objective facts. You can evaluate all the information and come to a logic-based conclusion.

What does that mean here?

There is an actual debate as to whether vaccines are safe and whether they should be given to all but a few situations which involve compromised health that are known. THERE IS NO SUCH DEBATE. Go to the CDC vaccine page and read all you want. The Mayo Clinic has a full discussion as well. Or go to Parents. The fact is that the Internet provides the ability of every crackpot in the world to set up a bunch of “sciency-sounded arguments” and claim that vaccines are both dangerous and unnecessary. The autism connection has been well proved to be a complete lie, and the doctor in question has been stripped of his license.

You as the average parent have no expertise in this area and cannot begin to “evaluate” the evidence and the websites that try to tell you there is a debate out there. You must trust, as we all do, those who have expertise. Those are scientists around the world who are telling you that there is no responsible study that justifies your avoiding protecting your child from all these nearly eradicated diseases. Vaccines are the reason why we don’t have polio any more and children don’t live in iron lungs.

There is no test that I am aware of to determine whether your child is that one in 50,000 or 1,000,000 who will have a seriously adverse effect from immunization. All states allow exemptions for children with known allergies or known medical conditions that would put them at risk. There is no “general” test to take. Therefore, there is no “choice” to make here.

You do not therefore have the right to unilaterally decide that you are not going to take this small risk on behalf of your child. That is not the bargain you made.

Bargain?

What am I talking about?

Sister, you are not living in isolation, you live in community. Our country was founded in part upon the concept of social compact. We deliberately then, and by inference now, agree that in return for certain agreed upon protections, we give up certain individual rights.

One of them, it seems to me is this: we do not have the right to make a choice of personal freedom that involves not being immunized when to do so threatens the herd. Whether you accept it or not, your “choice” to selfishly go your own way does exactly that.

Society has an absolute right to deny you that right or to explain that you will have to segregate yourself from the benefits of society if you insist. You may be “done with the bs about infecting others” but that is neither an answer or true. It merely suggests that you no longer care since it impinges on some right to do as you please regardless of how it affects other.

The record of immunization is very long and very successful worldwide.

Frankly, I do not think that simply by being a biological component of another life you have the right to make decisions that can so deeply affect their health and well-being. That’s the subject of another post entirely.

Your “choice” is no choice at all. It is simple an appearance of “taking charge” over an issue you are utterly ill-equipped to decide upon. It makes you feel like a “good” parent when in fact you are arguably the very opposite.

Is that confrontational enough for you?

Filed under: Crap I Learned, Medicine, The Stupic Chronicles Tagged: anti-vaxxers]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/02/15/anti-vaxxers-and-their-troubled-logic/feed/13spiritmeadowprodiseaseidiotsallhttps://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/02/15/anti-vaxxers-and-their-troubled-logic/Conservative Comedy Show: Is That Some Sort of Oxymoron?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/CZzhEWsWRY4/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/02/14/conservative-comedy-show-is-that-some-sort-of-oxymoron/#commentsSat, 14 Feb 2015 16:24:01 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8991]]> It is said (or at least it should have been said) that the human brain is pretty much capable of coming up with anything. I mean we humans have invented the most amazing ways of torturing people and killing them off bit by bit.

Go into any supermarket and stroll down the soda pop aisle or cereal aisle and you can see that we can invent several dozen variations on a theme, making each appear fresh and new.

But I swear I cannot come up with a viable version of comedy that stresses conservative themes and is funny at the same time. It would be a bit like pushing matter and anti-matter too closely together. It just implodes.

What on earth is funny about all the things that the GOP is for? They are for cutting taxes for the rich. That’s gotten to the point that nowadays we are sending money to them since they “pay” taxes in the negative.

They are for trying to offset their growing state deficits by adding “luxury” taxes to food and other necessities, taxes that cruelly attach more to the poor than any other group.

They are for the life of the fetus, which is surely laudable if it were coexistent with care for pregnant mothers, babies, health care, and a host of services to support that fetus as it grows to old age. But they are not.

They are against government intervening in the lives of ordinary people unnecessarily. They call this regulation. But the forms they wish to dismiss are those that protect people from dirty water, dirty air, shoddy manufacturing practices, unfair labor practices that endanger and diminish people. They figure kids, rather than get a free lunch should sweep the school for their dinner.

But when it comes to regulating behavior, they can’t get enough of regulations. They want to and do, try to regulate every aspect of women’s bodies when it comes to reproduction and girls bodies too. They seek to regulate what women wear. They seek to protect the rights of others to treat fellow human beings badly based upon personal ideologies that they call a “religion.”

They seek to express American exceptionalism by meddling around the world, upping the ante everywhere, bloating defense budgets to accommodate their need to puff out their chests and “prove” America is better. At the same time, they protect themselves and their offspring from standing on any battlefield they create.

They seek to pretend that race and ethnicity no longer are of any concern in their America. They turn the page by flipping the equation such that anyone who brings up the issue is dubbed a “racist”. They employ a few dark faces, who for the price of personal fame, are willing to nod genteelly in agreement. They twist and cherrypick the words of great civil rights leaders and try to claim them as their own.

They live every day using every convenience devised by modern technology. They tweet and fly, pick up their fancy lattes, take their youth-enhancing shots at spas, drive computer directed cars, yet when it comes to any science that impinges on their gravy train of K Street lobbyists and the free-flowing money that is funneled their way, science becomes pure bunk.

They prefer stupid, cute-talking bobble heads to thoughtful men and women.

They prefer “common-sense” to education, except when they visit the doctor or the dentist or the accountant or the lawyer, or the airport pilot. Education is for elitists, who are people who want to be better than the average person, meaning they get embarrassed when they haven’t a damn clue what is being said.

They are all for individuality, and they mean that they will say that everyone is equal, and you can just do the best you can. If it don’t work out, why that poor house thing back in the twenties wasn’t so bad, and we got a lot of free road work done. See don’t you feel better knowing you are paying for your own gruel?

They want to, therefore, end social security, cuz individuals properly prepare for their own old age. John-Boy is remembered fondly and surely was going to care for his ma and pa. You don’t need medicare either since health care is no right but a privilege reserved for those who have managed to acquire sufficient funds to pay for it.

There is no need either for unemployment benefits because it’s your job to foresee that free markets might end your job. Worse, if you are so down and out as that, you probably are not of sufficient moral character to withstand the urge to just sit on your ass and suck off the rest of us anyway, and we can’t have that.

And let’s not forget the churches. Our fine Christian houses of worships are dedicated to helping the “truly” poor, whatever the hell that means. Not so much non-Christian houses of worship which are really just oxymorons, cuz that’s what my Jezus said, after all, somewhere; at least he implied it.

I mean two thousand years of working on that issue, is a good start!

Immigrants were us two hundred or so years ago, and that was fine. Everyone knows white trash from Europe beats red skins any day. And immigrants are really good at cleaning houses and mowing lawns and picking fruit. They don’t want hardly anything for the privilege. But too many? Oh now, that makes you an ALIEN and an ILLEGAL.

Those words are words of fear, because damn, I’m following all the good rules set up by my betters, and fuck, life is still not any better, so somebody is to blame, and my betters say it’s THEM.

So, we can hate us some Mexicans and, hell all of South America pretty much just cuz. But we will not hate the Cubans, at least the rich ones who escaped Fidel. They are not aliens or illegals, but good people who lost their wealthy land holdings and much to be commiserated with.

We can hate us some Arabs, as many as we want and wherever we want, because we just want their oil, them that got it at least. The rest? Who cares?

We can ignore all our history and all of the worlds for that matter just because it interferes with the narrative we have to tell ourselves today to get to sleep. I mean the past is the past, why dwell on uncomfortable things like slavery and partitioning and supporting dictators and crummy stuff like that. It just makes me feel bad, and, after all, we have to deal with TODAY right?

Let’s make history a quest to make our kids good Americans! And we know what will do that. Put God back in school! In fact, let’s turn over education our youth to private enterprise, cuz they will do the job better and cheaper! And they will never have an ulterior motive to teach our kids anything that was wrong, or quietly made themselves look like the best thing since sliced bread, will they?

Let’s continue to push for not letting those who think against us vote. Let’s continue to make judges do what we want them too.

Let’s put a gun in every graduate’s hand. And I ain’t talkin’ about graduating from college, or even high school. Grade school is old enough to understand proper gun usage. Carry it proudly son. It’s what the Founding Fathers wanted for sure.

This is what the Grand Overly Dead Party thinks. Now, if you can come up with how to make this funny, do tell. I can’t come up with anything. Not a damn thing. A wake? I can come up with that, but not comedy.

Filed under: crap I learned but wish I hadn't, fundamentalism, GOP, Humor, Islamophobia, Politics, racism, religion, Satire, science, teabaggers Tagged: political satire, teabagger humor, the GOP]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/02/14/conservative-comedy-show-is-that-some-sort-of-oxymoron/feed/5spiritmeadowAllahu-Akbar-Its-Fridayglenn-beck-goes-crazy-in-radio-show-pin-head-funny-comedyhttps://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/02/14/conservative-comedy-show-is-that-some-sort-of-oxymoron/Obama is For Life-I’m for Deathhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/146xTYNbkGI/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/02/08/obama-is-for-life-im-for-death/#commentsSun, 08 Feb 2015 16:21:38 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8984]]> So we can start off with the “this is much ado about nothing” which of course begs the question, “why bother?”

Cuz a girl’s gotta write since it’s my passion, and there is always the miniscule hope, (for we all know that it springs eternal) that some poor bastard out there who was “damn the President for dissin’ Christians” will awaken from the fog of dissonance and the clear bell of enlightenment will ring forth: “I was once stupid and now I am not.”

Such is at least my justification for this essay.

I just happened to be tuned in the other morning as the President gave the traditional speech at the National Prayer Meetin’ which is held annually in Washington where all the sinners come to pretend they are doin’ their very best to apply God’s law as they slip another check from Exxon-Mobile and JP Morgan, into their $3000 suits.

The President, as we all know, has pretty much given up on the idea that facts, and good logic will get him anywhere, and as of late has pursued a policy of “screw you, try to stop me” and a general “fuck you” to Congressional Republicans who are fresh off the latest round of “ain’t got no bootstraps with which to pay for healthcare? Well die, you dog, and make room for those who do.”

As every good American knows, there’s the guys in the black hats (bad) and the guys in the white hats (good) always near to the scene. America is built upon this scenario and we have all the cheesy old westerns to prove it. Let us introduce the latest and best entry into the black hats category. A group known as ISIS (not to be confused with an Egyptian god) or ISIL if you have a clue what Levant means.

ISIL is a slipshod group of thugs who claim a perverted understanding of Islam which they use to justify their attempts to take over the world. Since their threat is pretty much everywhere, that means just about everyone else gets to be the guys in the white hats, but Merika of course always has to lead, cuz we are the super, super white hats.

Anyway, if you hadn’t noticed, we have a fair share of Arab Muslims (and Arabs in general) who live in the US, and boy I sure wouldn’t want to be them, since Americans are flighty people who tend to assess blame against whole swaths of people since it’s just easier. We learned that from the movies too, where it’s often best to “shoot first and ask questions later.” Anyway, even the dumbest of President (that would be you Dubya) have realized that it’s really not a good idea to let the great stupid mobs of American whiteness carry on in this manner, and so they are always at pains of ‘splainin’ to the stupid white people that NOT ALL ARABS ARE MUSLIMS AND MORE IMPORTANT NOT ALL MUSLIMS ARE KILLERS. In fact the huge majority are not, but are just peace-loving, family-seeking individuals like you and me.

Now Dubya can say nice things about Arab Muslims, and even hold hands with them, and nobody thinks a thing bad about it. He can even share a short peck and not even be thought particularly gay. Just good old American manners.

And he can say all kinds of nice things about Muslims to remind dumb American white people that it’s never a good idea to paint a brush too broad.

“America treasures the relationship we have with our many Muslim friends, and we respect the vibrant faith of Islam which inspires countless individuals to lead lives of honesty, integrity, and morality. This year, may Eid also be a time in which we recognize the values of progress, pluralism, and acceptance that bind us together as a Nation and a global community. By working together to advance mutual understanding, we point the way to a brighter future for all.” Presidential Message Eid al-Fitr December 5, 2002

But when President Obama reminds us that there are bad people in all religions historically who have done really bad things

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. . .So this is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith. In today’s world, when hate groups have their own Twitter accounts and bigotry can fester in hidden places in cyberspace, it can be even harder to counteract such intolerance. But God compels us to try.

the hue and cry from the extreme right in this country rose like a phoenix, screaming that such utterly evil words had never been spoken in all of our democracy. Former Governor of Virginia, Jim Gillmore was “outraged” having never heard a more terrible thing from the lips of a President. Santorum and Limbaugh chimed in with their mortification of Christianity today being compared to the unspeakable ISIS killers. And on it went, the rallying cry being “this is not a moral equivalency!!”

And it was not suggested as such either, if you read the text.

It was meant to remind everyone that while the killings by ISIS are horrific, we as humans have been doing horrific things to each other since the inception of so-called civilization, and a good deal of it has been veiled in perverted religious beliefs. People find it most convenient to put on the mask of religion to disguise their blatant lust for power and to express their hatred and fear. It has always been so. ISIS is no different in that respect than all the others. It is no more heinous, no more bloody certainly, and no more representative of the faith it espouses than any of the others were.

A few examples should suffice.

African-Americans in this country were often burned at the stake during slavery and Jim Crow. If you don’t think it was done in the name of Christianity, then read the words of the Confederate Vice President Alexander Stevens:

[T]he first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society … With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material-the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so.

It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made “one star to differ from another star in glory.” The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws.

The extreme Right-Wingers will tell you that the Crusades were wars of defense. Yet the arguable owners of that land were Palestinians and Jews. Muslims lay claim based on Muhammad. Yet Christians have no real claim certainly any greater than Jews or Muslims. All claim the area as holy. Yet when the first Crusade ended, the city of Jerusalem was cleared of all non-Christians, and by cleared I mean murdered. Jews who barricaded themselves in their synagogues were burned to death and survivors sold into slavery. All told the Crusades occurred over about 200 years, ending in 1291 or so.

They claim that the Inquisition was “political” as if that means something.

In fact the Inquisition was instituted by Pope Innocent III and set up by Pope Gregory IX. Confessors to heresy were burned alive. In 1242 the Talmud was condemned and burnings of Jews began in France in 1288. The Inquisition was begun in Spain for fear of “secret Jews” and the Conversos (those that had converted at pain of death in the first place and were suspected of retaining their true Judaic beliefs). In Seville alone more than 700 Jews were burned to death. By the time it ended in 1808, nearly 32,000 died by fire.

We need not but mention the Troubles in Ireland in which religion was the division between sides. Or that of India/Pakistan again, where religion affiliation defined the sides.

It is not that religion perverts human souls, but that some small sick group humans use religion to perpetrate their own evils upon the world.

President Obama, in the hopes of tamping down the ugly nativism that is so beginning to plague this nation with its ugly hate, attempted to remind us that we all have blood upon our hands. ISIS is but the latest in a long line of evil people doing evil things in the name of their perverted version of God.

** Let me recommend Jeff Sharlet’s book The Family which documents the shady and weird folks behind the National Prayer Breakfast.

**Also a great read is Karen Armstrong’s Fields of Blood which argues that religion has played a lesser role in most violence historically, however much it may have been the cover story. I’ve not read this but I’ve read others of hers and she is a uniquely qualified religious scholar who is highly respected for her scholarship. She was once a nun herself.

Filed under: An Island in the Storm, fundamentalism, History, Islamophobia, Muslim, terrorism, World History Tagged: ISIS, religious fundamentalism, right-wing crazies, violence]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/02/08/obama-is-for-life-im-for-death/feed/14spiritmeadowgroucho i'm against itbush-holds-hands-11-9-10bush-saudijesse-washington-lot13093-no.38https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/02/08/obama-is-for-life-im-for-death/An Open Letter to Stupid People (written in crayon for your comfort)http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/j8NHu3usyic/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/02/03/an-open-letter-to-stupid-people-written-in-crayon-for-your-comfort/#commentsTue, 03 Feb 2015 14:53:54 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8979]]> Okay, I know this is hard. Life is hard. I’m trying to keep this humorous because a lot of smart people read this, and frankly, you stupid people bore them, hence the levity. But I am serious. You gotta stop being so stupid.

First let us define terms. For you stupid people, it’s what we smart people do when we want to discuss a subject. It keeps us all on the same page if you can catch that drift.

Stupid: having or showing a lack of ability to learn and understand things.

Stupid may be inherent (big word meaning you’re born with it) or simply the result of being either unexposed to information or pure laziness. If it’s the former, we commiserate and have one sentence for you to memorize: MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS AND STAY OUT OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS. If you are unexposed to information, tell us how to help you. If you are the latter–GET OFF YOUR ASS BEFORE WE GET REALLY MAD.

We smart people are well aware that progress in civilizing the world occurs if there are only 10% of us, since we find you stupid people everywhere. Since God would not make things this way (we surely trust), your very existence proves Darwin was right. I know, it’s too hard for you to understand, but trust me, it’s true.

We are prepared to shoulder our burden of running the world, but you guys, fueled by jealousy it seems, continue to meddle in things you can’t or won’t understand. It’s time to stop, since you are on the brink of catapulting us all over the precipice of no return.

Worse yet, there are a whole brand of mostly not so dumb people out there that prey upon your determination to not know as much as a rock. They are called all sorts of names, but politicians is one of them. Advertisers is another, shyster is another. There are many. They exist to get you to do stupid things by tickling your brain just enough make you think you are acting smart. You are not. You are either giving them your money or your precious “freedoms”.

For instance, they have convinced you that you don’t need to do any study, because common sense is good enough to decide most things. It is not. Common sense, is well, common. It’s what makes you pee in an appropriate facility rather than the potted plant in the living room. It can be used only for really basic things. It will not explain to you anything much about economics on the national scale or the age of the earth.

They have told you that science is “suspicious”. It is not. It’s why a ton of you are alive today. Advances in medicine, metallurgy, chemistry, and so forth means that many of you are not dead from things that killed your caveman brothers a long time ago. They tell you that scientists don’t believe in God, which is not actually true, (many do), but also has no correlation to doing research accurately. (Correlation means that there is a relationship between two things, as in causation).

Tip: you cannot shortcut the discovery of truth by reading any ONE book. It requires the reading of many. Yes, bible readers, this means you. While the bible contains a good deal of useful information, it is not God’s manual. It was written by PEOPLE for more reasons that Carter has liver pills.

It is not our fault that you decided that college was “not fun” or “too hard” or “not the social party” you expected, and so quit for that little no-thought job you exist in today, or your small business making furnace filters. There is nothing wrong in doing the jobs you do, nothing at all, and if we are all going to be happy and comfortable somebody has to make coasters after all. But this doesn’t entitle you to sit at the big people’s table and tell us your views on the situation in Yemen. That requires that you actually know something.

You see, you are entitled to an opinion, and you can have it on just about anything you desire. But you see, having an opinion means little. My dog has an opinion on what he should eat and how much of it he should eat. I don’t often agree. And I am right and he is wrong, because he’s a dog. You are the dog here. Opinions have to be based on things called verifiable facts, logic and scary stuff like that. Otherwise they are a waste of everyone’s time.

The fact that some people encourage you and tell you you are right changes nothing. Refer back to the explanation of politicians and shysters.

Part of your problem is that you are afraid that because you don’t understand something, people will take advantage of you. That’s why you express a distrust for smart people and call them “elite intellectuals”. While we sympathize with your fear, the answer to this problem is not turning to people who talk to you in simple words and tell you you are right. Again, refer to shyster.

The answer is two-fold. Either stay the fuck out of stuff you don’t understand, or actually learn something.

You may have missed it, but there are places called libraries in most every town and they are filled with books about all kinds of subjects. Try using one some time. It may surprise you.

The Internet is a fine place to learn, but when you are taking baby steps, it’s best to be careful. Not everything you read there is accurate, in fact most of it probably isn’t. Until you have developed a modicum of “critical reading and thinking skills” be wary of the Internet.

Some rules of the road:

If it sounds like it’s something you would like, treat it with caution, look for the shyster!

If it tells you that you are the real strength of America, look for the shyster.

If it gives you simplistic answers that are painless to implement, look for the shyster.

If it mentions the word “trickle down” run like hell.

SOME BASIC FACTS THAT YOU MUST LIVE WITH:

The earth is round.

The universe is really really old, like in billions.

God did not make everything in six days.

Darwin was essentially right, you were once pond scum.

Vaccines do not cause autism and they are safe for the vast majority of people.

Climate change is real and man-made and we have to fix it.

There is a limit to fossil fuels. God won’t make any more for you.

Whether God exists or not is a personal conclusion and it’s none of your business what others conclude.

Nobody “chooses” their sexual orientation. It just is.

When people live in communities, it means that not everybody gets to do what they want no matter how much they want to do it.

EVERYONE is entitled to be fed, clothed, housed, educated, and maintained as a basic human right.

If you disagree with any of the above, you need to shut the fuck up, because YOU ARE STUPID.

In return for being good, we will make sure that you get the full benefits of #11.

Come join us! We want to welcome you to the ranks of the intelligent.

Filed under: An Island in the Storm, Crap I Learned, crap I learned but wish I hadn't, Humor, Satire]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/02/03/an-open-letter-to-stupid-people-written-in-crayon-for-your-comfort/feed/2spiritmeadowstupid3stupid4stupid6https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/02/03/an-open-letter-to-stupid-people-written-in-crayon-for-your-comfort/Fundamentalism Gone Sidewayshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/NPDf110FXts/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/fundamentalism-gone-sideways/#commentsThu, 29 Jan 2015 17:56:19 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8975]]> Anyone who knows me at all well, knows that I’m a bit of a crusader when it comes to fundamentalism. Since I fully admit that, I never ask people to accept my conclusions without good documentation.

I’ll try to be nice here, but please don’t hold me to it.

First of all, fundamentalist Christians refuse to accept that this description to the left is actually what is described in Genesis as the structure of the earth and universe. As you can see, it is not a globe at all, but rather a series of pillars, o’er covered with a “dome” with water above it, and of course below. The sun and visible planets and stars are inside the dome.

If you read the flood stories, you will note that this depiction allows for the waters to both arise from the earth and the sky. It also accounts for the oft-heard phrase, “four corners of the earth”. The “earth” was actually a flat disk. This is acknowledged by Jewish experts who ought to understand their own texts better than others, one would think.

Since even the most staunch Christian fundie accepts the spherical actuality of the globe, you can see why they can’t accept this actual description of Genesis but must fudge it to account for reality.

My point is simply that fundamentalism is based in large part on a fanatical belief in the truthiness of a book, and it is a self-serving literal-ness at best. In this they are no different from other fundamentalists in other religions. As any Muslim will tell you, fundamentalist jihadists misread and twist the Quran in a similar fashion in order to get it to “say what they want it to say.”

Suggesting that all fundamentalists are cut from the same cloth, sets the Christian right on edge. They deny it of course. Indeed if you look at the Wikipedia entry on fundamentalism, you discover that it is not limited to even religion at all but pertains to any ideology which is reduced to an irreducible set” of precepts which cannot be deviated from in any respect. A strict literalism is imposed as to the agreed upon rules.

Bob Altemeyer has done some exceptional work in this area, and makes his main research “The Authoritarians” avail as a PDF file here. The Wikipedia entry, while certainly nothing but a starting point, has a fine bibliography to get your started located here. Psychology has done much work in the area and you might start with this Pathos article, which will lead you to books and studies. Another well-researched book might be The Fundamentalist Mindby Strozier, Termen, Jones, and Boyd. This should help get you started if you wish to learn more. Again, don’t accept my word for it, go to the actual sources.

My point is not to rehash what is common knowledge, among anyone who wants to understand why we are troubled in this country with a segment of society which continues to place it’s personal religious interests above the common good, and most would say common sense. It is rather to point out by the above, that these are not choices made by rational minds, but rather what certain brain configurations are prone to fall into. Since in most cases it is extremely hard to eradicate or upset these mindsets, the only solution is to be ever vigilant to keep them out of the decision-making arenas of our common lives.

This we have done a poor job of doing.

Since we believe that religion is a matter of personal preference, we are loath to interrupt those preferences by any sort of “test” to eliminate those belief systems that threaten us all. And I agree that we should continue to do so. But we must also recognize that there are those among us who want a world much different from the one we inhabit. It is their stated purpose and their heartfelt belief that we should all be forced if necessary to accept their world vision in the guise of a government reactive to their vision of God.

They believe in a nutshell that all laws must be referenced to a book, the Bible in this case, and that of course they will tell you what the Bible says should be the law.

You may or not be aware that James Inhofe, (R-Ok) is the new chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Inhofe has for years argued that climate change is a hoax. Inhofe has received, tens of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel interests to fund his campaigns. Of course he tells you that he is a true believer, and perhaps that is true. It is always hard to say. But in any case, the Senator is prepared to argue that 98% of the scientific community is wrong on the issue of man-made climate change, and that his fundamentalist-driven approach is true.

What Inhofe admits, is that it doesn’t matter if climate change is occurring. Man is arrogant to go against God in this matter. As his proof he raises Genesis 8:22 which is God’s promise:

As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”

What I am being asked to accept is that the US and by implication no one else, should do anything about the clear evidence of a catastrophe in the making because of what a few people who are in no way experts in either the bible or the science of climate have decided is best for us all. Are you willing to stake the lives of your children and grandchildren on their being right?

Is Inhofe any different from the thousands who have gone to stand upon hilltops on the appointed day and hour to await the second coming, always to return home at dawn, a home that often no longer is theirs since they have sold or given away everything to insure God knows them as the true believers they profess to be?

Are we to go instead to live in Chief Justice Roy Moore’s world in Alabama? Judge Moore tells the Governor in that state to ignore a legal judicial pronouncement from a federal court on the illegality of a gay marriage ban because the judge has determined that the bible told him otherwise, and by fiat he proclaims the federal court decision as “unconstitutional.”

So much for the rule of law. While running for governor himself, Moore decried evolution teaching as “distorting our way of thinking”. Yet, the electorate in Alabama saw fit to elect him as Chief Judge of their Supreme Court, making him the greatest interpreter of the law in the state. This is sanity?

My point is that these people are dangerous to OUR life. We can laugh at them, we can face palm their stupidity and their childish emotional needs all we want, but they have carefully and for the most part quietly wormed their way into positions of power within our country. They have infiltrated school boards, city councils, state legislatures, and obviously on into our higher governmental positions where they, armed with pseudo-science and pseudo-theology, restructure our laws to fit their kingdom to come as they view it.

We ignore them at our peril. If we don’t stand against this sort of soft-headedness, we cannot expect an electorate who by and large is too busy to think these things through themselves to do it for us. We will find ourselves soon before the modern-day Inquisition defending truth against a country that is now governed by a rabble of no longer able or willing to discern truth from fantasy religious fanatics. They are NO DIFFERENT THAN JIHADISTS PEOPLE.

You have been warned.

Filed under: An Island in the Storm, Essays, fundamentalism, teabaggers Tagged: Extreme right-wing, fundamentalism, theocracy]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/fundamentalism-gone-sideways/feed/7spiritmeadowa-hyprocrite-religion-fundamentalist-demotivational-poster-1282266143https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/fundamentalism-gone-sideways/Just a Wordhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/f0Vsz8Bka8k/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/just-a-word-2/#commentsFri, 23 Jan 2015 18:40:13 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8969]]>I’ve recently in the last week started a new blog. It is nothing like this one, which has historically functioned as political satire for the most part.

Years ago, when I first started blogging, I was determined to be eclectic, including recipes, crafts, as well as political news. This I did against the sage advice to new bloggers to “keep to a topic”.

This made sense of course, since almost no one on earth shares my particularized grouping of likes and dislikes, interests, hatreds, peckish pet peeves, desires, and passions. You all have limited time, and you can go elsewhere where you get what you expect pretty much day in and day out.

Over the years, I separated out the recipes and religious, and the emotional growth stuff but never entirely. I also found as an election was won or lost that in the interim I had less interest in the day-to-day beltway chatter that motivates some. I don’t eat, sleep and play in the political arena.

I realized that this blog was getting a bit far afield for days on end, and sometimes for even weeks.

I hope to remedy that.

This blog remains what it is supposed to be. Here we discuss politics with all it’s wide-ranging and never ending topics.

The new blog Existential Eccentricities is something quite different. A number of people on Facebook have said over the last few months, that they enjoy something I did there most mornings. A rather bizarre, (hopefully funny) stream of consciousness about whatever popped into my head at any given second.

It is in a word, uncategorizable. It often pertains to events of the day, as well as personal asides on just about anything. I keep it fairly short, 500 words give or take. There may be as many as five or six topics, each given a sentence or three before something else pops in.

It may provide a bit of levity to your morning coffee. Perhaps you will account it as more a running commentary on a crazy woman.

I enjoy writing it immensely.

I hope you might enjoy reading it. If not, well, there is nothing like talking to yourself.

It is the razor strap to my razor, the place where I hone my craft.

Come by and let your hair down if you dare.

Filed under: Blog, Life in the Foothills Tagged: new blog]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/just-a-word-2/feed/2spiritmeadowhttps://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/just-a-word-2/Can They Get Any Crazier?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/jw8-OeLZhHg/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/can-they-get-any-crazier/#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 16:28:15 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8966]]> I do not mean to offend anyone.

That said, lets begin offending!

Seriously, I recognize that people have legitimate feelings and beliefs on this subject. I can sympathize. I can even say (easy coming from my perch as post-menopausal of course), that I might personally agree with those who say that it is taking a life. For me it might have been had I decided to do such a thing at the time that I was capable of conceiving. It never happened so I can’t say.

All that being said, let’s look at some points of contention:

(1) when does life begin? The simple answer to the simple-minded is “at conception. When egg meets sperm, cell division begins. But pregnancy does not, and some 50-80 percent of all fertilized eggs don’t implant successfully, and this can take six to twelve days to happen. Where you draw the line raises a host of really ugly problems that are legal in nature, and that is why when life begins is a subject medical and legal experts would rather avoid.

(2) Is personhood different from life? Surely most of us would say yes. When in the growth of the foetus does it become a person? Most would argue when it has viability outside the womb. Other’s of course want to return to that moment of conception. Again, medical experts will differ and the legal implications are huge.

(3) can you rationally be for some types of abortion and not others? Can you justify logically abortion to save the life of the mother? Are you not tampering with God’s province then? Can you make exceptions for rape and incest and if so why? Morally aren’t you compelled as Steve King is to ban them all? (men find these issues so darned easy don’t they?)

(5) Fetuses suffer pain at abortion. This is not true either. Most medical experts based on a myriad of studies don’t believe a fetus is capable of pain prior to the cortex being wired in at 24 weeks. The vast majority of abortions are done before this period.

(6) the US in the guise of the right to anti-abortionists is well-known for its save the fetus at all costs” but then ignore the infant, child, youngster afterward. The same people who are in the forefront of pushing these anti-abortion bills through the House of Representatives, are the same folks who vote against food stamps, contraceptive care for women, medical care for children, and a host of other social programs that ensure that youngsters born in this country will be raised under healthy conditions. The argument is clear, you aren’t pro-life if your ONLY concern is bringing forth a birth, a birth you then abandon.

As you can see, the issue is a complicated one and there are no easy answers. While it is easy to take a flat stand as many Republican men do (not having to contend with pregnancy has it’s benefits), when you get in the weeds the going gets pretty darn hard. Not that most of the far right has any problem with being disingenuous or illogical.

On the anniversary of Roe v Wade, the GOP House thought to take advantage of the situation and pro-offer a bill that would make their base happy, and accomplish nothing since it could not pass the Senate, nor be signed by the President. It was a win-win for them. •

Until even some of their Republican ladies even thought that the bill went too far, encompassed too much, and was just full of some of those unintended consequences mentioned in (1) and (2). Marsha Blackburn, (R-TN) and all around stupid person, charged with marshalling the bill through the House, retreated in the face of growing distrust in their own caucus. The provision that proved deadly was the requirement that rape victims would be denied an exception to the general ban unless they had reported the rape to police.

The extremists on the right are predictably displeased and threatening to pressure those wavering Republican women. I’m sure it’s the traditional, if you want to keep your job, you better!

With all this at hand, just how comfortable are you with telling another woman what is best for her? I know I’m not. And I will support her right to decide these very complicated matters herself and with the people she chooses to ask advice of. As they say, if men could have babies, this would never be an issue.

• • •

Filed under: Abortion, An Island in the Storm, Human Biology, teabaggers, Women's issues Tagged: abortion, right to choose]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/can-they-get-any-crazier/feed/8spiritmeadowabortionhttps://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/can-they-get-any-crazier/Whose Freedom?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/31jPhm0_-l8/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/17/whose-freedom/#commentsSat, 17 Jan 2015 16:58:15 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8963]]> This whole Charlie Hebdo thing is pretty deep if you stop to think about it. Of course most don’t treat it as such. It has become a knee-jerk reaction for most. Jon Stewart pointed this out when he suggested that some countries who have championed free speech and press, actually arrest plenty of speech in their own countries.

We are all in danger, it seems to me, of being hypocrites, myself included. I confess right now that I have participated in at least two attempts to squelch the free speech of others when it came vile bigoted hate speech against the President.

It’s not nearly as easy an idea as it might appear to be.

A friend of mine posted a link to statements made by the Pope. He suggested that free speech must be protected, but that, “You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.” Francis did not expound on what should be the consequences of such inappropriate speech, but he warned that the attacks in Paris can fairly be expected from such talk.

I tend to disagree with Francis here, at least insofar as he claims that the ends justify the means. If he suggests that we should ban hate speech vis-a-vis religion if it would engender violence, then this leaves us under the thumb of every radicalized person about any issue he or she defines as “religious”. Where would it stop?

I am aware that all speech is not protected. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said in Schenck v. United States, 249 US 47 (1919), you are not free to yell fire in a crowded theatre. Forever after we have lived with the standard of “clear and present danger” as the bellwether of when speech crosses a line to incite lawlessness.

To succumb to the threat of violence if you “say those things” invites the standard (a difficult one at best) to be flipped to be defined by the one threatening the violence. I have no doubt that the Pope spoke in the general, and as he put it in a friendly manner not meant to be a papal statement of substance.

They have been not only roundly ridiculed for such a decision, but criticized as well by the reputable press.

In the post I cited at the beginning, one read the expected Christian whine, “The only ones we have to be kind to are the militant, extremist muslims who might behead us. All the other religions are fair game.” Such rhetoric is of course, both nonsensical and off point.

In fact the world community has stood up very clearly and said, as offensive as Charlie Hebdo is to most people at one time or another, they have he right to say what they wish about Muslims or anybody else for that matter. In a country that is overwhelmingly Christian, (Pew estimates that 78.4% of all Americans define themselves as Christian) it is predictable that the religious right will complain that it is a victim of persecution!

This all suggests that at least some of the Je suis Charlie is nothing more than acclamation that the “right” religion is being attacked. Should Charlie Hebdo attack, (as they of course have done and no doubt will continue to do) Christianity, these self-defined freedom proclaimers will be calling for Charlie’s head.

Some things it seems to me need to be cleared up.

Speech is speech, and unless it reaches the “clear and present danger” standard, ought under no circumstances be prohibited. Westboro Baptist must be allowed to spew it’s hate, as well as the KKK and various right-wing evangelicals and their “burn the Quran”. Atheists who call believers names fall into the category as well.

Speaking against a religion is not persecution of that religion. Persecution involves state action to suppress a religion because of its existence. That does not mean that it is right or to be championed. It is to be marched against, spoken against, and shunned in the most clear way. But it must not be prevented.

When we speak of “not offending” another religion, we are again talking about state action. It is improper to set up creches in public places such as town property, because that is the government speaking then. It is quite proper for a private establishment decorate as it wishes. This is I think where people get most confused.

When a store decides to use the phrase “happy holidays” they are not persecuting Christians, they are choosing to respect all their patrons, Christians and others as well. Similarly if a store chooses to say Merry Christmas or Happy Kwanzaa that is their choice as well.

While I see Oxford Press’s point, I think they have stepped over the line. Some attempts at political correctness are simply absurd. Small children have no clue the point being made, and who are really addressed are parents, who are surely capable of explaining to their young if they think it necessary.

We simply begin down a dangerous path when we start deciding that certain types of speech are not allowed. In Germany for instance, I believe it is still a crime to speak out in denial of the Holocaust. While there might have once been reason to do such a thing in the raw years immediately after WWII, I’m not sure it is still valid. Many countries have liberal prohibitions of speech that attacks the state. These too are wrong, as most of us would agree.

We must never forget that at one time, the most innocuous of things today was then blasphemous. People were arrested for speaking about all sorts of things that threatened the state (religious or secular) either directly or indirectly. We have come a long way, in most of the civilized world. If we resort to making it illegal to speak our minds about anything beyond what threatens life itself, we run the risk of turning backward down a path that leads to dictatorship, repression, and tyranny.

Those on the Right, who so vociferously espouse “our freedoms” should be the first in line to defend speech. But of course, they have are not. But then, true patriots reside elsewhere on the spectrum, as we all suspect.

Filed under: 1st Amendment, An Island in the Storm, Constitution, Editorials, Essays, Islamophobia Tagged: 1st Amendment, free speech, Paris]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/17/whose-freedom/feed/8spiritmeadowfreedom-of-speech-156029_1280-488x700https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/17/whose-freedom/Looking Down From Mt. Olympushttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/r-cEH2_6RMI/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/looking-down-from-mt-olympus/#commentsThu, 15 Jan 2015 18:57:56 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8959]]>
As I paddled around the pool today I got to thinking, which is what I do a lot of at the pool. Warm, undulating water has that effect on me. I wet, therefore I think. Or something like that.

As usual, I got into a bit of a scrap with some fellow who went to my high school, though I don’t know as we ever met fifty or so years ago.

I was calling stupid people slugs, and he was intent upon proving that he was no such thing. Which begged, literally begged the question, of why he thought I was speaking of him. The irony is so delicious, only the truly stupid would miss it. I guess he did, for he left the conversation in a huff with the usual, “you have too much time on your hands” which is supposed in some distant corner of the world to be an insult of sorts, but of course my response is, “well, actually I have just exactly the right amount of time on my hands, which is all of it, since I’m smart enough to organize my life in such a way that I control what I do almost all the time.” Or, I could have said, “yeah?” Either one suffices.

Anyway, I thought to lighten the atmosphere by a general meme, about all sorts of fairly unimportant questions which generate, or so I hoped, some conversation. Things like, what’s would you do differently if you could start over in life? or, What’s your most prized possession? Or what are you reading? You know, small talkin’ stuff that passes for what people who really don’t know each other call conversation.

Course it doesn’t work on some at all. I find the uber conservative right to be largely incapable of letting anything roll of their Christian backs. They hold a grudge. I guess they would tell you that Jesus told them to. I never read anywhere where he said that, but they are constantly amazing me with the things they pull out of their bible about Jesus, such as that he hated minimum wage legislation, and was against governments carrying for their citizens. My favorite was a statement that Jesus was for the 2nd Amendment. A jaw-dropping moment if there ever was one.

Anyway, (my favorite segue ), my little graduating class of 1968 is particularly priggish I think. We were a frightfully cliquish set of groups, totally barely 100 or so, and basically people that couldn’t stand each other then, still can’t. But interesting, some of the nicest people I think of today from that class are people I didn’t know at all back then. The clique thing, of course. As one has come to expect, the super popular people from then, are mostly dickish today. We knew they would be. The world after all, was not the least bit impressed with them as individuals, they only shined as members of the “in group” of student government/ cheerleader/athlete/pretty faces, in that small setting. They do glory though in their reminiscing of the only glory days they apparently ever knew. A bit like Brick reliving the glory days through his bottle, or Maggie telling him, “I don’t live with you. We occupy the same cage.”

We maintain a wary truce most of the time, by agreeing to not talk to each other directly. “Like” the innocuous entry, about nothing of value, and avoid each other the rest of the time. I find it funny mostly. A friend suggested that the deepest pain comes when we are young and vulnerable. People in our later ages can’t hurt us as deeply. We have grown a depth of skin to ward off their arrows. He could be right.

A life well lived is the best revenge they say, and I think that might be true.

Someone I read wrote an interesting piece about urban living. I started thinking about that. I’ve lived in cities, and in suburbs, and in the real country. Each has their good points, each their bad. But I think it has more to do with age. The city is for the young, least it was for me. Fast, brutal, unforgiving. The country. Idealistic, pure, honest. Suburbia? Where do you place that baby? Wisteria Lane? Baby carriages and SUV’s? Neat lawns. Deceptive, rigid, and a masquerade? Yeah, can be. All depends on at what point in your life you find yourself there.

I have hated suburbia, and I’ve loved it. I love it now. I have always loved urban as long as you live in the part not in need of renewal. Country? What’s not to like, but be the fact that weather becomes your parent? You have to be physically fit and fairly youthful to contend with a half mile that needs plowing to get to the store ya know?

I’m damned blessed. And I do know it. I was paddling around this morning, as I said. Thought of plenty of shit while Elton John talked about Rocket Man, and Freddy Mercury wailed about having killed a man. Here I am, floating around in a very nice pool, that costs me about $.50 a visit for an hour, getting my upscale “exercise” with a bunch of middle-aged folks like myself. My husband, is at Wal-Mart buying dog food and coconut milk and various other sundries that are cheaper than at the “other” grocery story I go to on Wednesday. My housekeeper is cleaning the house. I’ve got the sauce already cooked for today’s meal, beef enchiladas with ranchero sauce, with mexican rice and ranch beans.

If that doesn’t scream privilege and blessing I don’t know what does. So here I sit, writing, and I’m going to do some more reading and some beading and then later join my husband for an evening watching TV and chatting about thirty-two things that might range from the theory of time, to how best to get Frida to stop screaming every time I put her on a leash. We’ll all settle in to relax and chat and snack, and comment on this or that as the evening wends its way to bedtime. We’ll all settle into our beds, the dogs in theirs and we in ours, and we’ll all soon fall sweetly into sleep until we get up and do some more stuff, that pleases us and seldom imposes any undo burden.

I’ll bob around the pool, and Parker will cook (Philly steak sandwiches this week), and I’ll learn hopefully a few more things I didn’t know before, and we’ll laugh at so many things along the way, and the dogs will bounce and lavish us with kisses, and ya know, damn I am one lucky woman.

But I will still scratch my head that there are actual breathing humans in this country who think health care is a privilege, who think that evolution isn’t true, that deny climate change, and who manage to still walk and talk without a single brain cell in their vacuous braincases. And I will be alternatively angry and pitying and finally stoic if I can, that I can only speak truth, and the rest is not up to me.

Is your world similarly insane?

(A world where there is a Mittens, and a Huck, and a Bushite all in the same race? AND a libertarian loon? Oh it’s gonna be a fun one kiddies, a fun one indeed.)

Filed under: Brain Vacuuming, Essays, Life in the Foothills Tagged: people, stuff]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/looking-down-from-mt-olympus/feed/1spiritmeadowmille-religions-dieux-543podrivingfingerhttps://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/looking-down-from-mt-olympus/Women and Children First!http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/gYjnShVz_hU/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/10/women-and-children-first/#commentsSat, 10 Jan 2015 18:16:12 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8956]]> I heard that phrase in the context of the Paris shootings. The one at the store. Where hostages were taken. I was listening to Al Jazeera, and the commentator said, “among the hostages appear to be a number of women and children.”

A normal enough statement, one heard in many contexts. Fires for instance–first attend to the women and children the men are admonished by each other.

It sounds quaint.

It sounds sexist.

It sounds wrong.

Not that I don’t believe in taking advantage of every possible opportunity to get ahead in life, and being favored to survive is certainly one of those things. Can’t say I’d turn down the offer if it came to that. I’m a long way from being noble, so I probably would. Take advantage of the “women first” offer.

I’d no doubt try to lay it to something else. I’m old. I’m not agile like I used to be. I can’t swing from trees anymore. I deserve special treatment. Yeah, I can come up with a good excuse I figure, should I need to.

But it’s not right. I have to admit that. Like it or not, it’s not fair, not right, reeks of all sorts of bad things. It’s not stoic I know. Nor is it rational much.

It places a burden unfairly on one sex for no good reason. You can’t help being male, so why are you supposed to die first as some goofy sort of gallantry? Nobody believes that “fairer sex” crap any more.

Boy from the day you were born, know this–in case of emergency women and children have more right to live than you. Unless you’re disabled or feeble-minded. Or maybe not. If you aren’t healthy in mind or body, ain’t it better to cull the herd and save the fittest? Old ladies would not pass that test.

It’s harder to make an argument against not saving the children first. I can, sorta.

Look, nobody is here by special dispensation. We all were born from the union of a sperm and egg. All are destined to die. Plenty of babies die, plenty of fetuses die. Plenty of old people die, and all in between. There is no way to judge why somebody is worse off by being cut off in the “flower” of life. Heck one could argue that some don’t face as much suffering as the old have had to endure. That’s a good thing. Given none of us knows what happens “after”, heck dying might be the best of all worlds.

So you see, it really makes no sense. We need to stop this women and children first nonsense. We aren’t God, and it’s not our job. Yes, I realize that a toddler isn’t going to be too adept at making his way to the life boat, but then again when there is only a little space left, the toddler will fit and I won’t. It’s just how shit happens.

Kay Bailey Hutchinson was interviewed about it on UP with Steve Kornacki. She didn’t see it as a big deal. She thought you have to make a lot of allowances for these older men who are going through “the transition”. You know, the transition? From being troglodytes to human beings? And exactly how many decades need this transition take you might ask?

Did you know that women, as late as the late 90’s were warned about getting into an elevator alone with Strom Thurmond, that dead-man-walking-racist-piece-of-shit? Then there was Robert Packwood. Does this crap never end?

Somebody posted on our high school alumni page, “what would you do over again if you could?”

That’s always an interesting question I think.

There are lots of answers you can give that sound so, well, intellectual or spiritual or some combination of both.

“All the stuff that happened, even the stuff that wasn’t pleasant contributed to who I am today. Who knows who I’d be if not for everything.”

Yep, I agree. It’s pretty much unknowable.

Still.

Others say,

“I’d not change a thing! It’s been a hell of a ride.”

Yep, I agree.

Still.

See the error of the above, or so it seems to me an error, is that it means you really haven’t grown much, emotionally at least. Don’t you want to take back time wasted with people you now know to be idiots? And people that turned out to be deep and thoughtful and nice? Wouldn’t you have liked to have spent more time with them?

I would.

I’d like to not have participated in any form of bullying, or being mean to anybody just cuz they weren’t in my “group”. I’d like to have been more my own person and not so much of a follower of the crowd. I’d like to have argued with teachers more. I’d like to have been more principled.

These insights come from age and experience. I’d like to think I’d grown some in the intervening years. I was a racist as a kid, because everyone I knew was, though that is no excuse. I’m less of one now, though no doubt I can still be taught a thing or two about being not-white.

I accepted that as a female my life was defined in certain ways. I don’t now, and I’d like to think that matters.

I thought God was a bizarre notion as literally enunciated in the King James Version of the bible. I think quite differently now that I know what a fundamentalist is, and that that version of God is, yes, pretty warped, but there is a vision that makes a lot of sense to me and that heartens me immensely.

If I had it to do over again, I’d not go to law school but I would go to grad school. I’d have been a theologian or a philosopher I think. Don’t know where that path would have led, but I know one thing. There is no better place to live than in a college town. Anywhere.

An old friend of mine once told me that she had listed in her teenaged years, all her goals in life. Some twenty-plus years later, she was proud to say that her goals were the same. She thought that was a badge of some sort of maturity. I thought it was sad. To be that much older and to have no better goals than the ones you jotted down as a sixteen-year-old?

Save me from people who have no curiosity or breadth of vision. Bring me the dreamers, the wonderers. On them are built the future that I wish to inhabit. The rest? Oh gosh, they are still in the cave, still thinking that the shadows are the reality.

We can’t know who will be the Plato nor the fool. So messing with who lives and who dies should not be our prerogative either. We’re all just doing the best we can, and trying to avoid the troglodytes ya know?

Filed under: Crap I Learned, Essays, Humor, Life in the Foothills, Psychology, Satire, Sociology]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/10/women-and-children-first/feed/2spiritmeadowtitanic-sinking-lifeboats1https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/10/women-and-children-first/It’s All About What You Knowhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/B-brsH93d2s/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/its-all-about-what-you-know/#commentsThu, 08 Jan 2015 15:32:43 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8952]]> As a self-described political satirist and all-around commentator on the human condition, I confess to spending an inordinate amount of time talking about stupid people.
Now, let’s define our terms here.

Stupid stands alone as a condition not susceptible of being fixed. One is born stupid, lives stupid and dies stupid. Moreover as John Cleese explained, and actual real serious studies confirm, stupid people are so stupid they don’t know they are stupid. The set of skills needed to assess ones relative “smartness” are sadly lacking.

Ignorance is a quite different thing, though I think most people take offense at being called ignoramuses. They should not, since ignorance is something we all share as to many many things. Ignorance is merely lacking knowledge on a particular subject. Ignorance, therefore, can be cured as to any particular thing, merely by acquiring the necessary information.

But what kind of information?

Ahh, there is the rub, as Shakespeare would say.

Which leads to the focus of this essay–the propensity of us humans to become angry at those who express ideas and act in ways that denote lack of knowledge of a subject. I’m here to tell you that you should not. I should not. No one should.

One can go back to Epictetus for the proposition. Perhaps it was known before him, I am ignorant of knowing before Epictetus.

Epictetus argued, (I would say successfully), that no human acts deliberately for the bad. The bad you say? What is that? Let us begin with the premise that there is good and there is bad. It is generally good to not harm people for instance. The devil is in the details as they say. As it any particular person we might disagree. It might be considered by some people to be “good” to kill a tyrant. Others might disagree. But we all agree that a norm is that people should not be harmed.

So, to a great degree, when we talk about specifics, what is good or bad is somewhat subjective.

Does that mean it is arbitrary?

No, of course not. The decision to define something as good or bad depends on the amount and the quality of information possessed. That’s where all the argument comes in. I say that you have made a poor decision about X because you have received either inaccurate or insufficient information. You might say the same of me.

When you include more and more people, a consensus is arrived at as to whether a particular thing is good or bad. It may not be correct, this consensus, however, since a minority might very well possess the better argument, the better data.

What else is at work?

All the panoply of “stuff” that make up the human condition. Our desires, our experiences, our fears, our goals. All impact how important that “good” is to us and thus how resistant it is to being overcome by newer and better data. The stupid person can probably never overcome his emotional lock on a particular belief as being good or bad, while an ignorant one can be brought to a point of discarding her belief in favor of one truer.

Deepak Chopra said the same thing in one of his books. I recall it as something like, “each person is doing the very best they can given their level of knowledge.” It is of course no different from Epictetus.

You may claim no, some people are born bad, and choose bad because it is their nature.

Are you sure of that? I believe that to be a convenient lie we tell ourselves. It allows us to hate whom we hate, and to kill whom we wish to kill or otherwise put them out of our way. American prisons are chock full of people we have “given up on”.

Let’s take a couple of examples.

A young man slips a gun into his waistband and leaves his home to head for the corner where he will sell drugs for the afternoon. If confronted in the wrong fashion, he may well shoot at someone to defend his “turf”. Is this youngster acting deliberately badly?

I would argue no.

He is making a decision that based on all he knows (limited as that might be), this is the best means to attain his goal–living his life in some acceptable manner. The funds he acquires from his trade of drugs for cash affords him money for food, lodging, clothing, and leisure activities. He acquires, among some subset of humans, “status”. He acquires some modicum of power over unarmed persons he comes upon should he choose to exercise it. He has concluded that either his school offers no real education, and even if it does, there are no jobs suitable that would give him the above in an equal measure. He has reasoned that his neighborhood is dangerous and if he is unarmed he faces the real possibility of death.

He has made all these assessments more unconsciously than not perhaps, but they are hardly unreasonable. Given more information, he might not make these choices, but others that we, who have not his experiences consider more “good.” But he is probably not stupid, just ignorant of a series of truths that can and would alter his calculus.

Let’s look at another example: Sean Hannity

Hannity is one of the more egregious cases of Fox News “journalism”, a form of journalism in which actual truth plays little part, but where a point of view is underpinned with weak facts, and assumptions to support one political ideology over another.

Hannity has been caught selectively editing film to say exactly the opposite from what the taped statement actually said. He twists facts, ignores others, mis-states others, and berates anyone who attempts to introduce other facts that go against his desired meme.

Does he do this deliberately? Probably.

So he is actively pursuing the false? Don’t we agree that that would be a normative “bad?”

Yes, it would, but Hannity I am sure believes he serves a higher purpose. I suspect in his mind, he believes that the average viewer is incapable of understanding and is without the “insider” information he possesses. They must be appealed to viscerally rather than intellectually and led rather than informed. Hannity himself is part of that small cadre who “knows” what must be done, knows what is best for the country and world, and can’t take a chance that you, his viewer will be confused. For after all, you are tuning in for an hour, while he is living this “issue” all day, every day.

A Hannity can’t be convinced by better information, because of these hidden assumptions. He can only be “corrected” if his other assumptions about his own relative insider view of the world is changed. In other words, He would have to lose his arrogant assumptions about his relative worth vis-a-vis the “masses” in the world. Hannity is not a man to be hated, but rather one to be pitied. He lives and is content in his own delusions.

What does all this mean in the end? Not much, other than perhaps a lowering of one’s own blood pressure.

When confronted with the wrong-minded I can relax knowing that:

They might be purely stupid, in which case, there is nothing any mortal can do about it. Move on.

They are ignorant but happy in their ignorance because it satisfies their emotional needs as they view the world, in which case, they are to be pitied. Move on.

They are ignorant because no one has yet provided them with the additional information they need to change their opinion. Step in and offer them what you know and where they might obtain more.

Learn to discern which of the above is applicable. A few conversations should suffice.

There is only one caveat. Even if talking with a stupid person, if you are in a public forum, do continue. Many people are listening, and some of them, perhaps only one, is paying attention. You can change the world, one person at a time.

Filed under: Crap I Learned, Inspirational, Life in the Foothills, Philosophy Tagged: ignorance, knowledge, shit I learned, stupid]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/its-all-about-what-you-know/feed/8spiritmeadowcharlie-brown-and-snoopycalvin bliss 1https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/its-all-about-what-you-know/The Lions Disappoint. What’s New?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/7fSvKRO_Xbs/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/05/the-lions-disappoint-whats-new/#commentsMon, 05 Jan 2015 17:50:04 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8947]]> No, I’m not crying in my cups this morning. I ceased doing that many a decade ago. I am here only to make some statement on behalf of all those who are crying still, tossing and turning all through the night, tissues still clinging to tear-stained cheeks, bits of nachos stuck still in beards and in cleavages, bodies too wracked with mental misery to bathe before seeking the comfort of blankies and darkness.

I speak for them, the great masses of sad fans who must suffer the slings and arrows, er, oh that’s a different story entirely.

Actually I come to suggest that there are in fact no great masses at all, but rather a small group of lost souls who still cling to the thought that these hapless boys in Hawaiian blue, might bring forth a victory one day. In a word, forgetaboutit.

I know of what I speak, for a look with not exactly fondness at the prospect of turning sixty-five this very year, and confess that yes, I lived all too many of those sixty-five in the state of Michigan. For many a reason I consider myself well rid of that mittened image, but that’s another story entirely too.

I grew up, as many working class kids did, with a male parental who was known as a “football fan”. Lucky indeed were we, for we had a team of our own, unlike the orphans living in Connecticut or New Mexico, who must survey the surrounding environs and then choose a team to champion. At least we can explain that we have no choice in the disaster that was foisted upon us.

I recall those years of my youth, watching AFC games on Saturday and NFC games on Sunday. I remember those hated nemeses Chicago and Green Bay and Minnesota. They were the teams that seemed always to come out on top. We were trampled by the likes of Butkus, while Starr passed us by, and Horning laughed as he tripped down the field.

I remember the curses hurled upon the feckless Lions by my father who growled, about how they were surely to fall again, as the litany of three and out reverberated in my ears again and again. We had a hapless quarterback called Milton Plum, and it was run, run, pass, kick all the game long. Truly great players like Alex Karras and Dick LeBeau served out long careers among the hapless kittens of blue.

For years we blamed the coaches, and then the general manager. But most of all I blamed Edsel Ford who owned the team, sure that if only he would sell the team to someone who cared, all would be better. A family toy was not how a professional football team should be treated, I intoned. The cheap skate! If only he would spend a few bucks.

Well he did, on Billy Sims and Barry Sanders. But if only he would spend some money on ALL the positions.

Well I guess, somewhere along the line they did, and nothing changed.

Oh there were moments of near glory, moments when our hopes were raised.

And that’s when we began to suspect that this would never change. Like most games, there were moments of brilliance, and then the roof fell in as usual. Occasionally a win was eked out, but it was almost always a nail biter. A couple of promising runs, a pass or two, and then it ended, and a feeble field goal was all that was salvaged. Another and then another, and whew, we had a nine-point lead. Five minutes later, after two great and rapid drives, our opponent had scored two touchdowns and we were behind once again.

We seldom recovered.

It became like that all too often. Enticing us, tempting us, letting us dream of victory, but they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory again and again.

Some of us got smart. In fact most of us did. We became like orphans and we found other teams to admire, teams that didn’t always let us down, who didn’t flirt and then wrap up the goodie bar tight and go home, leaving us, well, off to take another cold shower as the metaphor would go.

I became a Broncos fan, though I rue that now that my old standard John Elway became a flaming douche of a right-wing nut. I searched for a team to be mine, one I could proudly display on cap on jacket and bumper.

And I wondered. What makes this team so god-awful bad?

A myriad of coaches, a myriad of quarterbacks and receivers didn’t change a thing. New general managers, new stadiums. Nothing made a difference.

I was forced to examine the fans, and there truly seems to be the answer.

For the Lions don’t command a fan base like the rest of the sporting world. And that can’t be blamed on just poor performance. The Boston Red Sox went through the “curse of the bambino” for 86 years and yet their fans remained loyal. Mets fans remain loyal though most years that team remains in the basement.

I have gone to many a Pistons game, and baseball and hockey game in Detroit. And I knew lots of other people who did as well. I can categorically say I never ever heard a single person who said, “we went to the Lion’s game yesterday”, while standing at the water cooler on Monday. Not once. Never.

Lions fans, such as they were, suffered for years when ticket sales were so dismal that you couldn’t even watch the team on the TV because the games weren’t televised locally when the stadium wasn’t sold out. The threat of “no TV” was not enough to induce lackluster Lions fans into spending a few bucks to sit in the stands.

Of course the team, like all others, talks about how wonderful the fans are, and how they are energized by their cheers. One wonders if the Lions haven’t developed a strong aversion to sound, such that boos sound like rahs to them. Because if the rahs are forthcoming, they soon succumb to the reality of Lions football–the praises turn into curses as the team falters yet again.

The facts are what they are.

The Lions remain the only national conference team that has NEVER played in a super bowl.

So I come to the only viable conclusion that can be reached, the fans are responsible for the failure of this sorry excuse of a team to win. And worse, it is fans like me, fair-weather types, who have long since stopped the masochistic pursuit of sticking by their team, and moved on.

As the game with Dallas went on and the Lions looked again as if they just might win, my husband, football analyst and all-round Green Bay fan, stated, “babe, the little brothers are gonna win this game I think”.

To which I replied. “wait for it. Don’t be sucked in. They will fade and die. They always do.”

“Away with that negativity,” he ordered.

“Just experience, my dear, just experience.”

And then the passes started going awry. And the runners stopped finding the holes. And Romo started to connect, and Dallas got a touchdown, and then it was only by six, and well, to us old-time knowers of all things Lion-y, the hand of doom was about to strike.

And it did, and they walked off again losers, not meant to be.

And I must admit, I’m to blame. I just didn’t love them enough.

Now, how ’bout them Packers? Oh yeah, and damn Spartans were something weren’t they against Baylor? Now that’s football!

Filed under: Brain Vacuuming, Entertainment, Sports]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/05/the-lions-disappoint-whats-new/feed/4spiritmeadowBUCSPOSTER92detroit-lions-fan1https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/05/the-lions-disappoint-whats-new/They Make Too Much Damn Moneyhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/E0Chrd14opM/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/03/they-make-too-much-damn-money/#commentsSat, 03 Jan 2015 17:11:04 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8944]]> For reasons that I don’t truly get myself, I’ve been intrigued to the point of passion with this seasons college football season. On the whole I rather like college sports over professional, and I’ve watched not only my beloved Spartans, but the entirety of the national race for #1 team of the year.

I confess that I enjoy all the games, albeit, I am intellectually against what I see as an over-emphasis on the unholy dollar bill.

I admit up front, that I don’t know a single “fact” regarding Jameis Winston’s rape allegation. I have read generally that many who have looked into the allegations believe that the University of Alabama and local authorities either deliberately ignored evidence or worse, or at minimum failed miserably to conduct anything like a reasonable investigation. Winston may well be innocent. I have no clue. There are rape charges that are untrue, and as a lawyer, I had one or two that I felt were bogus.

That’s really not the point here. The point is, that if there was not a full-fledged investigation, then justice was in no way served, and it can only be for one reason. That reason is that Mr. Winston was deemed too important to the football program at Alabama to be lost. So he was not to be benched “pending investigation” even. Rather it was, it seems all made to go away, with him never missing a snap.

Again, this case is not important, but indicative of a greater problem, one we saw even more clearly at Penn State regarding the Sandusky affair. People look the other way, push evidence under the perennial rug, and otherwise not upset the financial apple cart. What apple cart is that?

It is said that among the major players in the NCAA football world, schools bring in millions of dollars per year. In fact at Penn, one year’s profits covered the $60 million dollar fine imposed upon them.

In nearly every single state in the union, the highest paid person is a football or basketball coach.

The revenues of the athletic departments of these schools are separate from the university budget and are TAX-FREE.

I am no fan of Jim Harbaugh. In fact I dislike him rather a good deal, but I surely get why he decided to downsize from the pros to college, when Michigan offered him a 7-year contract worth $40 million bucks. Imagine, 40 MILLION BUCKS to instruct young men to play a game!

One could, at one time I guess at least argue that these young men were at least getting an education. No more of course, with the big talents opting out for early drafts, leaving school without their diplomas. And of course the atmosphere now may be anti-learning anyhow.

Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL classes are POINTLESS,”

Yes, I guess they are Cardale. Here we have a child in a man-body prepared to stake his entire life on the millions he dreams of making in the NFL. What will he do if that is cut short by some catastrophic event before he steps off the plane to sign that contract? An uneducated, nobody looking for work just like everyone else, all because education is like “pointless” dude.

Yes, they do entertain us, and they do an excellent job at that, but I’d be willing to bet that that is not what is at issue here anymore. It’s all business and no doubt it starts now at the high school level.

On New Years, MSU came back from a huge deficit, a game that was surely lost, and scored and scored again and again, until they were within a touchdown of winning. And then they did it. They scored, and Baylor road home stunned and unable to fathom what had happened. Houston did the same thing yesterday to Pittsburg, scoring like three times in 15 minutes and winning two on-side kicks in a row.

These sorts of games make fans jump for joy. Yet in a state like Texas, the Baylor players may well want to transfer to another state to play next year. Football is life there.

Still, when all is said and done, colleges and universities are supposed to stand for something. It is supposed to be about building character in youngsters through athletics, team and individual efforts, winning and losing and doing your best and accepting being bested. When the FSU players walked off the field after being bested by Oregon, were they showing character or simply the behavior of brats who have been coddled into believing that they were God’s gift to humanity and deserved to win?

Are we teaching our youth anything that will sustain them in the future when we play to this sort of thing? When we pay their coach millions for a game? When we “wink, wink, nod, nod” them why supplying them with “extras” under the table? Surely you must know they do.

Can we expect a Cardale Jones to believe anything else when his coach makes ten times more than the university president?

I recall many years ago a young man who stood before a judge about to be sentenced for some criminal act. He wore a jacket with the name Georgetown emblazoned across the back. The Judge, an alumnus of that university, asked, “do you know what Georgetown is, sir?” The youth replied, “yes sir, it’s a basketball team, sir.”

Filed under: Entertainment, Sports Tagged: money, NCAA, Sports]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/03/they-make-too-much-damn-money/feed/9spiritmeadowJameis Winstonhttps://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/01/03/they-make-too-much-damn-money/What A Difference a Year Makeshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/2F8ORiXRYjM/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/29/what-a-difference-a-year-makes/#commentsMon, 29 Dec 2014 17:39:44 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8939]]>
We are fast approaching the end of things. That sounds ominous. It’s December 29, and Thursday we will awaken, albeit a few of us with aching heads, to discover that like a bright new shiny penny, the year has flipped to 2015.

This week is all about retrospectives, and I am finding them tiresome already. Turn on any cable news service and hear the refrains:

“Top ten natural disasters of the year, coming up next!”

“Who we lost this year in sports and entertainment!”

“Top five books of the year. Have you read them yet?”

Last year I realized that I was (as I always do) losing track of all these milestones during the year. I created a private blog just to jot down events as they took place so I would have them to turn to to “remember”. That lasted, ummmm, somewhere like a week, maybe less.

As I’ve pointed out at this time of year, nearly every year, I don’t do resolutions, finding them silly, self-defeating, and but another excuse for dragging out the old whip to flagellate my increasingly intolerant body.

So once again, I’m doomed to discover that people I really admired died, and I’d totally forgotten. And there were scientific discoveries that I had peripherally noticed and tucked away in some recess of my brain to which I’ve since lost the key.

About the only things I’ve remembered well are my own name and my address, though I often stop for a moment when asked my phone number or zip code.

Actually I remember a lot of political stuff, and that is probably not a good thing, since most everything that happened last year is eminently forgettable or should be. Given that I am a political satirist of sorts (god, that puts me up there with Jon Stewart, John Oliver, and Lenny Bruce, right?), it’s only natural that I should. Remember that crap, that is.

You may wonder why I think of myself as a political satirist, since this blog has taken a bit of a turn away from the day-to-day regurgitation of the crazy Reich-Right (use those Nazi references when you can). Because, even when I don’t technically refer to politics, I’m usually grousing about the people who make politics a living hell by their ignorant interference in things best left to adults with an education that goes beyond “how does a bill become a law.”

I say living hell in the sense that I do care that this country continues to swirl around on the event-horizon of a major black hole of doom. It hurts. And that engenders, as a defense, anger and yes even a modicum of hatred. Epictetus tells me that I ought not to become emotional about realities as such, but spend my energies doing effective things, but woe is me, it’s so much easier to complain.

A few friends tell me that they avoid politics because it is just too unsettling, and I do respect that. There is no fun in continually poking yourself in the eye with a stick in the hopes that someday, it either won’t hurt or magically you’ll get 20/20 vision for your efforts.

I must admit to a sick sense of fun in all of it too, and that undoubtedly is what drives me to continue. I’m sure a psychiatrist would have a field day in my head, but I do enjoy poking a stick (not in my eye) but through the bars at the caged idiots. For stupid people are caged whether they realize it or not. Caged by their lack of vision, lack of curiosity, and willingness to live a life of dreary ordinariness if only mas’r will give them the illusion of prosperity. Poke I will, with relish, because I enjoy the resultant explosion of racism, sexism, and all the other ism’s they exhibit when blood pressure overcomes what little common sense they possess. There is no knowledge to overcome since the very word suggests elitism to them and they regard education (except good-old fundamentalist claptrap as the work of the devil).

The point really is that a year makes no difference at all. For some this has been a hellish year, one they can hardly wait to escape and start out fresh again. This is balanced by just as many who have had a delightful rich and fruitful year and hope that next year just continues in the same vein. Neither is being objective of course, and no one says they should be. Each operates from a singularly personal experience, much as some men love blondes and others brunettes or as the song goes, “I like my women a little on the trashy side”. Some women love them some nerdis sorts, while some love SOA’s Jacks on his bike.

What’s new under the sun? (Oh I can go on with these all day folks).

Even though I don’t “do” resolutions, I do do intentions.

Intentions are much milder than resolutions as you can see. They are gentle and express a longing and desire, rather than some fiat imposed with an iron will that will be shown to be all too bereft of any undergirding at all.

So I have intentions.

To write better. This is of course easy since I am the arbiter of success here. I determine what constitutes “better”. I can’t lose on this one.

To read more. Again, I self-judge based on my recollection (no matter how faulty) of how much I have read in the past year. Philosophy is my focus this year.

To continue toward the light, however I define it. There are many paths, and I intend to peek down as many as I’m able in the time yet allotted to me. All knowledge benefits so nothing is lost on the road more traveled as well as the less (eat your heart out Frost).

To seek truth always. Truth untinged by desire and predisposition requires the constant overlay of critical thinking. We all fail much of the time. I desire to fail less often and about less important things.

I seek to be more of what I am destined to be. Don’t we all?

I intend and that is a victory in itself.

Gosh, so many of you have enriched this year for me. I thank you all, whether you ever knew or not. I consider myself among the most luckiest of humans. I live with a man who continues to delight me with a freshness of spirit and wit, who challenges me in a million ways that keep me alive and vibrant while loving me unconditionally. I have the sweet softness of dogs who suffer my failings and limitations while offering a love which they neither understand nor question. I live in surroundings that delight and prick my curiosity and remind me that beauty comes in many forms. I have pursuits that challenge my intellect and patience, and occasionally stamina. I am blessed beyond measure, and have nothing whatsoever to deserve it.

I am humbled for there are those more worthy who have so much less.

It has been a year, and like all such artificial divisions, it has no real meaning beyond what we assign. After all, before us, what was time but a thing yet to be named? Or no thing at all.

Filed under: Life in New Mexico, Life in the Foothills, LifeStyle Tagged: New Year, retrospectives]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/29/what-a-difference-a-year-makes/feed/5spiritmeadowlion-king-rafiki-quote-past-can-hurthttps://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/29/what-a-difference-a-year-makes/A Few Disjointed Ideas Or Why Do They Call It Pi?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/hvyQV_N04MY/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/23/a-few-disjointed-ideas-or-why-do-they-call-it-pi/#commentsTue, 23 Dec 2014 22:17:00 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8936]]>As long as people like this are around, I figure I’m safely ensconced on the “sane” side of the room, so you can safely read on, assured that nothing is likely to snap in your synaptic cable system. Really, it’s okay. I’m just eccentric, not a homicidal serial killer.

I woke up this morning with the usual, “oh shit, it’s Monday!” I say that knowing that a lot of you can relate. It’s common enough, the “Monday blues” as they are known far and wide, perhaps as far as Antares for all I know. It seems unfair, hating Monday as I do, since well, I’m RETIRED and so the whole reason for hating Monday doesn’t really exist for me.

But the WORLD keeps revolving around Monday, so naturally we schedule our lives around it even when there is no earthly or extraterrestrial reason to. The fact that I KNOW this, and still hate the twenty-four hours that constitute the “first” day of the week, is well, unfortunate to say the least, and places me in a classification that will be revealed at some later date.

As I noted earlier, it has a nice M to start it off with. M, I point out, is a substantial and stable letter, firmly centered on it’s three point stance. Unlike the L which seems to have forgotten to complete itself, or the U which appears to be ready to topple over at even the merest poof of a breeze.

For reasons that are unknown to any human who thinks, we name all the weekdays with “day” at the end, which is both unoriginal and suggests a certain lack of memory power. And as I’ve remarked before, we completely ignore the “night” aspect of the 24 hours that encompass the “day”. So it seems we have a bigoted disposition toward day and against night.

But that’s a whole ‘nother issue entirely isn’t it?

After that there is nothing unusual about it. It’s followed by a O and an N. Tuesday, as you can see is followed by a U and E, which makes it a very precarious day all together, with all the letters threatening to fall on their ass, lacking firm foundation. Wednesday starts off okay, but then gets all confounded with letters that you can’t even hear, like D, again the instability fairly cries out for a crutch. Thursday has a H, which is okay at a capital but pitiful as a lower case, having lost it’s base completely, and followed by another U, making the whole day dangerous and not to be trusted. Friday, is well, who can argue with the day that precedes the weekend even if it has a letter that looks like it died on the way to it’s own funeral?

I’m sure you never thought of these things, but they are important.

Why?

Why how else are you to discover your favorite letter? Everybody should have one.

I used to like things like capital D’s for instance, because you could do loops and swirls and make it quite pretty. G had possibilities too, if you notice. But my favorite was always J. You could do a lot with a J if you really worked at it.

Now, back to Monday. You see, the reason Monday became the most hated day of the week, is because contrary to any common sense, humans for the most part engage in work that they dislike. It starts with school, which is disliked by most, but not all, but most. Then we go to college to learn stuff, which is going by choice and not requirement, and still, mostly we don’t study things that we like.

Mostly we study what will make us rich.

But we don’t get rich enough it, so we have to do it a long time, and since we hate it, we hate Monday, which is the day all that work crap begins. It’s called transference. We can safely hate Monday, not so much our jobs, lest we start listing the methods of suicide least messy.

We all love Saturday, because that’s not a work day and we begin to do the shit we like to do. But we only do it for one day, two at most. Some of us feel guilty about having a good time on Saturday, so we go to church on Sunday to beg forgiveness, think of our sins, and promise to do better, which we do at least on the drive home.

Then we sit in front of the TV and drink beer and complain about how life sucks. A bunch of guys beat each other up for our enjoyment while we grouse. Then we nap, because usually we are fairly sleep deprived from worrying about all sorts of things, most of which we can’t do much about, but theorize that if we could, our lives would be a lot better.

We wake up, and grouse some more, because the weekend is nearly over and so we lose ourselves in make-believe lives of real housewives, which are neither real nor probably housewives, until we stagger into bed.

When we wake up, it’s MONDAY! How’s that for the old stick in the eye?

I hope this explains things to you, and convinced you that J should be your favorite letter. After all, it’s easier to be June and July and that beats out a January, so it’s got that goin’ for it. Unless of course you live in Hawaii where it probably doesn’t matter much.

*Part 372 of the on-going series: homo sapiens–why you are better off being a salamander.

First Sony’s emails get hacked and the bodies are strewn across America from sea to shining sea.

Then Sony produces a movie about Kim Jong Un and it is cancelled because North Korea hacked into their system and threatens to pull out all their fingernails and toenails if they don’t.

I saw the interview with Seth Rogen on the Daily Show, and even I’m scared that they will come after me.

But Sony, what in the hell did you do in a previous life that is bringing down all this upon your corporate shoulders? I know the corporation is suffering, since the SCOTUS has explained to me that corporations are people too and can have religious opinions and political ones, so no doubt they can feel pain and fear as well.

Is this just karma?

Or is that blasphemous itself and really the great white beard in the sky getting back at Sony for some perceived failure to bring good Christian movies to the screen? I mean, I suppose THAT movie, The I N T E R V I E W, (that should confound any hacker), could be considered Christian, but then again, maybe not, since I have not seen it. But I must say that Seth Rogen, (who is an awful interview by the way with a horrid giggle that is super annoying) doesn’t strike me as someone you might see at the local Baptist Church, being Jewish first of all. Maybe it’s his Canadianishness that is the problem, though I don’t recall the Good Lord speaking about Canucks in the New Testament at least, though they maybe those Canaanites with just a spelling error.

By the way, why DO you think that God sports a beard? Did Gillette not get the franchise in heaven?

So anyway, let me just say a word or two about all the hoopla.

First, what possessed Sony to think it was a good idea to make a movie about assassinating a living person? I mean that is really the issue of first import here. I’d be the first to tell you I think His Special Imperialness Kimmy is a screw loose and on the run. Giving that man a nuke is probably not on anybody’s wish list. Still and all, he does qualify genetically speaking as a human being and as such has a right to not expect his very life is made sport of. His life may be supercilious to be sure, but still, it’s the only one he’s got (apparently).

I mean seriously folks, we make sport of crazy people all the time, and we make movies about them, but we call then Prince Crazypants of UZ-beki-beki-Uz-stan. We don’t call-em by name and country. Did Sony fear we couldn’t figure it out?

All would not have happened had they just called him “Jim”.

Beyond that, well, opinions are rampant on both issues. Fear reigns supreme at the present. Sony is “corporately speaking” hiding in the closet, George Clooney is asking why everybody is being such a lady part and having no manly parts? And most normal people go about their business and don’t have much of an opinion, unless it has to do with somehow it being Obama’s fault and therefore a nuke delicately placed up Kimmy’s arse is the ONLY proper response.

Which all begs the second issue, personal chit.

Sony’s other issue deals with hackers who exposed a lot of emails between Sony personnel. They were as you might expect, rather unkind to some people and made jokes at others expense.

What’s new?

I mean that seriously.

We live in a time when the government can hack our phones and listen to our conversations. Corporations regularly have their credit card banks violated. Facebook and my computer monitors everywhere I go, and everyone I talk to, and presents me with “other things I might like”.

While it might be fruitful to make some acts criminal, and a lot more actionable as “violations of privacy”, they cannot be termed unexpected by any sane person any more. They are business as usual.

Whether the government should listen in, it will or somebody else will. And like the rung bell, it cannot be unrung now. The same people who work for the government work for themselves and rogue governments and will do it anyway. If there is a means to profit, people will do it. That has always been the case, and will always be the case.

The fact is, that really smart people choose to do criminal things for either more money, or more thrill. You can’t change that, and so you pretty much gotta live accordingly.

Big brother is watching and so is big sister, and big daddy and mommy.

It’s no use lamenting that fact or pining for the good old days (as we have pointed out, they had plenty enough of their own problems whether you remember or not). Don’t write down what you don’t want published across public domains. Simple as that. Save your salacious remarks for in-person conversations and check your lunch dates for wires (okay that may be too far). PS: microphones of any kind are a tell-tale sign that what you say may be heard by OTHERS.

If you are like me, I pretty much don’t care what you know about me, though I would rather you didn’t have my credit card numbers. But I gave up information just a week ago and had to cancel a card and change my passwords, because I acted before thinking it through and was taken in by a website that looked perfectly legit yet on second thought, made no sense. It’s part of life, and with each episode you learn a bit more how to protect yourself.

So, let the media rant and rave about all this business of hacking. Some day, people will find it so normal that we won’t talk of it any more. It will undoubtedly spur new technology to develop “zones” of privacy which will then be the subject of new hacking efforts. And we shall survive it, and on to another level we go.

That’s my take on all this stuff. Sony, I know this will embarrass you, but dude, you were just stupid. Do you feel the pain?

Filed under: An Island in the Storm, Corporate America, Crap I Learned, Humor, Media, Satire, Technology Tagged: corporations, hacking, privacy]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/19/oh-say-can-you-hear-me-now/feed/3spiritmeadowSony-makebelievesecurityhttps://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/19/oh-say-can-you-hear-me-now/Is It Part of Growing Older?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/7mW10QRQojI/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/is-it-part-of-growing-older/#commentsThu, 18 Dec 2014 17:53:26 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8925]]>I’m greatly afraid that my generation has lost its collective marbles. I take comfort in the fact, that every generation at some point is spoken of this way. If I’m right, then we are doomed as a society, and that would displease me quite a lot. I’d hate for civilization to end on my watch.

A friend suggested that he thought we got a “pretty good high school education.” I spent more time in social studies and literature and thought the offerings mediocre (looking back from of course the lofty position of “higher” education), while he spent time in math and science and thought he got a rather good effort from his teachers.

The problem is one of perspective of course. Those that have nary opened a serious book since they paraded around the gymnasium in their blue gowns and little hats rather think they were “well-educated” since they have managed in most cases to chew gum and walk at the same time, which is, albeit for some a herculean effort.

Those that either attended a reputable university (all the TV preacher colleges excepted please), or those motivated by someone or something to learn on their own, have a better perspective I would argue to decipher the puzzle.

If you mean, did I learn to read and write a simple enough declarative sentence, read road signs and interpret them correctly, follow the directions at the polling place (and be there in the first place), stand when I heard the National Anthem (unless I was flirting with Marxism at the time), and pay my taxes on time even while cutting every corner I thought I might get away with, then yes, I was well-educated in high school.

If you mean, on the other hand, was I taught to read carefully, discriminatingly, and with a critical eye, was I taught to evaluate arguments, avoid straw men (what the hell were they?), reserve judgment until more facts were accumulated, heck define a fact from a feel-good facsimile, then no, I was not well-educated in high school.

The fact is that education, publicly at least, has probably always been the former, more or less. We are required to attend school to accomplish this: (1) become “good” citizens however defined but including being law-abiding, honest (on the big things at least), voting (again at least on the big things), and willing, oddly enough, to offer one’s life up for the entity known as “one’s country”, and (2) to fill out simple forms and read directions such that one can do the above as well as become a good cog in the economic machine.

A certain number of those being so groomed are culled from the herd as “college material” and will go forth to don the white collars and supervise the rest, or provide other medium level services, such as accounting, teaching of the young, druggists, and so forth. They may at will also participate in low-level political jobs such as school boards, city councils, mayoral duties in smaller towns, and so forth.

The malady of which I speak or was alluding to in the title seems to affect mostly those who rather blithely go through life, thinking themselves both learned and intelligence with nothing but a faded high school diploma to assure them of their abilities. The malady?

Thinking that things were better “back when”.

I belong to a forum or two dedicated to the high school I once attended, and it is fraught with this sort of talk. The old neighborhood has “gone down”, it’s not longer “safe”. All the old hangouts are “torn down”. Many a sentence begins with “when we were kids” and then goes on to explain how we were safe, happy, well-fed, drug-free, healthy, robust, patriotic, god-fearing, obedient, polite, mannerly and so forth. By contrast today’s youth are none of the above, except one’s own grandchildren which are all perfect and the best ever produced.

Of course there are myriad causes for the “decline”, but it usually breaks down to one of several causes: (1) Democrats, i.e., liberals, (2) Republicans, i.e., conservatives and tea party adherents, (3) lazy people, i.e., people of color including immigrants, (4) crime and drugs, attributed to number (3) and condoned by (1).

The life seen in retrospect was akin to Donna Reed and Leave it to Beaver rolled into one.

We seem to have forgotten a lot of real truth here. More than a little I would say. In fact while we remember the “good” we have forgotten the bad. In the 50’s and 60’s most children who contracted leukemia died.

Most African-Americans were trapped in ghettos in the north and Jim Crow lives in the south. But at least we could boast that the tax rate on high incomes was upwards of 90% something which causes gasps today as we have been taught that asking the rich to pay any taxes somehow inhibits their ability to “create jobs”. They created plenty back then. Today big agribusiness has driven most small farmers out of business, while they reap farm subsidies alongside the natural resource people adding to their billions of profits each year, but it’s somehow really bad to give people food stamps to eat. Those are handouts and wrong. Business subsidies are good. Those things remain with us from our youth.

Women made less on the dollar than men than they do now, back in the 50’s.

(The ad denotes that a man wearing these pants is so amazing that a woman can’t wait to be walked on by him). This is how our mothers were thought of. It is the role model many of us grew up with. We looked to “marry well” and have kids, and keep a clean house. My mother and her sister-in-law waged a silent battle to out do the other at Thanksgiving and Christmas meals and my grandmother joined in for who could be-ribbon their gifts with prettier and bigger bows.

How far back to you want to go?

Not as far, I gather to the great depression?
Not so far as World War II? Let’s skip that part about Russia and the Cold War, and practicing duck and cover under the desks. Let’s skip the Cuban Missile Crisis when even us kids walked on egg-shells knowing something awful was afoot.

If you stopped at the high school level, then you know so damned little about the reality of this country that you’re bound think that the 50’s were great and should be returned to.

That’s why when people who have some knowledge of the unconscionable things this country has done in the name of “security” or its economic interests”, naturally point out those evils, you feel attacked. You then come with your misunderstood “history” which was never really true in the first place but was fed to you to make you a good obedient citizen.

You tell us your distorted recollection of the founding fathers, now lacquered with Christian fundamentalist fervor. You tell us of “unfettered free markets” which never were in the first place. You tell us of all the bullshit you’ve been fed since by a propaganda machine that claims it’s “fair and balanced” so you trust it. It’s all crap, but now you’re defending your “way of life” which was nothing like reality in the first or last place, but makes you feel relevant once again.

The fact is you don’t know the real world and don’t want any part of it. It makes you feel uncomfortable because it goes against all you remember from the past plus what Fox has told you to fear and blame. So you do, and you wail for the “good old days” when life was perfect, although it wasn’t, and you’re neighbor was beating his kids, and another was raping his daughter, and another was suffering with knowing he was attracted to other guys and had no one to confide in, and this family was fighting over money every day and night, and that mother was a secret drunk, and the lady across the street took pills to keep from screaming.

That’s real life. And it’s a damn shame that you are in your sixties and still have no clue. And you won’t learn because shit, it’s just way to easy to pretend, and blame somebody other than your little group. And the beat goes on, my friend, and you never grew up and you never will.

And that’s why your education sucked in high school, because nobody ignited the spark of curiosity in you, and you didn’t have it naturally. At that’s most of you. Thank god, apparently society functions like that. Or maybe it would be better if it didn’t.

I just know I’m not like most of you. Not better in a lot of ways. In a lot of ways worse. But man I cannot live in a dream world created for comfort. I cannot. It will not be part of growing older for me.

Filed under: Crap I Learned, crap I learned but wish I hadn't, Humor, Life in the Foothills, Psychology, Satire, Sociology Tagged: aging, good old days, illusions, life in the foothills]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/is-it-part-of-growing-older/feed/7spiritmeadowthe_50s_those_good_old_daysnonPC ad 2nonPC ad 3degradingwomengoodawfulhttps://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/is-it-part-of-growing-older/Violence and Pacifism, An Either Or Proposition?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/3EHx8oNEgz8/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/13/violence-and-pacifism-an-either-or-proposition/#commentsSat, 13 Dec 2014 16:24:40 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8922]]>Let’s be clear. I have no answers here. I have questions and beliefs, and that is all. I’m not suggesting what we should do, other than have this conversation, no matter how unpleasant and uncomfortable it makes us.

Anyone who suggests there are easy answers, or who whats to “leave it to the experts” and sweep it under the rug of “not my pay grade” be damned. You can’t avoid your complicity by refusing to be a part of the issue.

The discussion of war/pacifism, torture, rules of war, and so on, have confronted the human mind since the beginning of human interactions. While a certain defense of one’s personal integrity seems genetically normal, beyond that, we argue through the ages about how much is too much, when, and how?

As I said, there are no easy answers. It is for instance easy for me to come down on the side of pacifism, since it is my natural proclivity to choose life over harm to every and all creatures. Yet as a carnivores, I am immediately confronted with my hypocrisy, though I can respond quickly with “well exactly what do you propose to do with pigs and cattle, turn them out to fend for themselves as easy prey for predator animals?” Not your problem?

The world consists of very few individuals who will willingly stand still in the face of a direct lethal attack, and say, “do what you must, I will not lift a hand to defend myself.” And by doing so, do you contribute to the violence of another?

Both these are acts of violence whether you accept them or not. A strict pacifist can neither consume meat nor defend themselves against attack.

Trying to cut them out of the mix, and then say, well all else, I come down on the side of no violence is just as fraught with exceptions. One can, and I do, argue that I will not kill 2 to save 10, but figure that fate must be allowed to play out as it will. But turn that figure into killing 10 to save 10 million, and you see the dilemma. Now it looks quite a bit different. Surely Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified on such grounds.

The Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive strike proved a disaster and surely violates in principle and act, the idea of “just war” theory. The Bush Doctrine might prove workable in the hands of a bright, moral being, but proved horrific in the hands of a stupid man egged on by arguably evil men at his side.

Just war “sounds” right, and surely has the imprimatur of the Catholic Church, but is it really just? How about all that talk of “rules of war”? Does not tidying up the killing to MOSTLY the perpetrators just prolong what would otherwise be so horrendous as to cause cessation? Do we appease the warmongers by pursuing military targets and not civilian? Was not some of the reasoning behind the US entry into WWII the magnitude of the killing? Was it not motivated in part by the inhumanity of the German war machine with its blitzkriegs, and the indiscriminate unfairness of the Japanese “surprise?” Would it all have been better if they had followed the “rules?”

It is not as ugly to push buttons from Colorado to kill convoys in Yemen, where yes, we allow for “collateral” damage? Would it not be better to force humans to face up to the bodies they produce? Was not part of the argument about pilots the nicety of not having to see the mangled flesh they produced by their bombs?

Torture has been in the human playbook for as long at least as recorded history. We burned and drew, quartered, and stocked, long before waterboarding came along. Technology brought us advances which brought electrodes, cattle prods, chain saws, drills, and a host of other household items to the torture table. We justify all this of course by the need for intelligence.

We do the unthinkable because it is necessary to protect the greater good, so we tell ourselves. Our television screens are full nowadays of “heroes” who regularly break, stab, beat, human bodies in the quest for the information necessary to “save lives” and protect our way of life.

What way of life are we protecting in the end? The life that condones and is willing to survive as a result of such human acts?

Where is the line? And who calls it? Is Jack Bauer the one you want to decide? Or a feckless Congress who measures everything by political leverage and opportunism, all too often limited to their own personal professional lives? Do you want to throw the dice on an individual you vote for when the entire game is now rigged by the rich and powerful whose interests are almost never going to be yours and who live by the credo, that the birds do not consider the interests of the ants they eat?

Are we any better than they when we do what they do in the name of stopping them? Do we want to be better than they? Do we care beyond our own hides in the end? If not, then we need to stop flooding the world with our proclamations that we are moral and they are not. We need to stop accusing them of violations when we are committing them at an even faster pace.

There is a reason we armed the Taliban against the Russians and then proclaimed them our enemy after 9-11. There is a similar reason interred the Japanese during WWII. We arm the bad guys all over South America because they agree to our long-term goals, while their peoples writhe in agony from the tortures they employ. We enlist countries with “softer” rules to be our locations where we can avoid our rules of law, and mistreat humans in the name of saving democracy.

I say all this and then I sit with my head in my hands because I don’t know where to come down on the oft used scenario: you have in custody the man who knows where the hydrogen bomb has been planted in NYC. You have six hours to find it. If it goes off, millions will die, and the country may well fall. Well? torture him or not?

Perhaps the scenario is unfair, perhaps using the worst-case scenario is unnecessary and unfair. But once you allow for it, then how about Springfield? Or Kalamazoo? How small does the scale have to get before we say, too far?

Does justice demand something else? Does it demand an all or nothing? Or does it ask us to submit to a conclusion unpalatable but possibly real? As long as humans care about living, we have to admit we are natural killing machines, and do it as efficiently as possible with as little collateral damage (innocent death) as possible?

Is there a philosophy that can cut through all this and make it a simple argument that cannot be denied?

I surely wish for one, but so far, I have not found it.

I remain sickened. I know what I would stop, but I can’t give you a logical play it out to the end answer that works for all things in all times.

If you can, please tell me.

But damn don’t avoid the issue, for we all are complicit whether you like it or not.

Filed under: Brain Vacuuming, Editorials, Philosophy, War/Military, World History Tagged: morality, torture, War]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/13/violence-and-pacifism-an-either-or-proposition/feed/4spiritmeadow04torture_span-articleLargehttps://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/13/violence-and-pacifism-an-either-or-proposition/From Whence Came We?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/-_DZM4uQYQ8/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/12/from-whence-came-we/#commentsFri, 12 Dec 2014 16:32:16 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8918]]>From an early age, I wondered about where I came from. Perhaps it is why fairy tales failed to trigger my imagination, for I took such things literally and soon discovered that they didn’t live up to logical expectations.

Take Santa Claus. I loved Christmas more than any holiday as a child, and of course I believed in Santa as all young children do who are raised in the Christmas culture. I was not plagued by older siblings who told me it was phooey, or well-meaning adults who “slipped” and brought that belief to a screeching halt.

No, I figured it out all alone, one pre-Christmas night as I lay in bed, trying to will Christmas morning a more hurried arrival. Ignore all that problem of reindeer and flying, and just how much any sleigh could carry, the time just made no sense. Even with a full 24-hours across the globe, Santa would have to travel faster than fast to visit all us boys and girls. I started with just my own “neighborhood” of about one square mile. Why it would take at least an hour, but even it only took 15 minutes to visit a few hundred homes, why there was the city, and then the state, and then all the states, and then ALL of Canada, and then Europe, and even those awful Ruskies had children, and that was a BIG country too.

Well, that is one story, but eventually that grew to all the other questions that needed answering about how the earth came to be, and how the moon came to be, and how humans came to be. I systematically investigated all these things from childhood to adulthood, getting more and more sophisticated answers surely. I became a student of sorts of astronomy and later cosmology, and paleontology. I read books about these subjects for fun, marveling at great mysteries.

I became of course no authority, and understood only up to a point, for sooner or later much of this turns into mathematical equations far beyond my learning. But I got the scientific answers for the most part. As I matured, and developed some sense of a spiritual life, God entered the equation as well, and over the years I discerned that these are really two questions. One demands reproducible proof; the another a philosophical elegance of argument.

Of course the argument rages on, with fundamentalists entering where they do not belong, and atheists peppering them with irrefutable logic at most turns. Both are wrong, because as I said, one does not really relate to the other except when one (the fundamentalists) demands that the Bible be used as a scientific text, and the other (the atheist) insists that all believers are fundamentalists.

Science, in the area of cosmology does posit that there may be unknowables, forever unknowable. Brain scientists question the ability of the brain to know itself in all it’s complexity. There may be limits therefore to human knowledge. If there are, then God has the place of “unmoved mover” as Aristotle suggested.

Fundamentalists fundamentally don’t understand or don’t choose to understand things like the 2nd law of thermodynamics for instance. Sooner or later, in an attempt to sound scientific, a fundamentalist while draw herself up and point out that Darwin’s evolutionary theory violates it. Now, if pressed, she would not have a clue as to why, but she read it somewhere in one of her “how to stump your evolutionary friends” and prove Darwin wrong. Of course it does not, because entropy only works in closed systems. The earth is not a closed system because it is being bombarded continuously with solar radiation (energy).

This is only their second best argument, for their first is always, “if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” Well, my fine airhead, it’s because we didn’t evolve from monkeys, and nobody ever said we did, except another uninformed fundamentalist. First, we are related to apes, not monkeys (and there is a rather big difference), and second we are not evolved from them, but actually share way way back, a common ancestor. We both branched off in different directions (picture the fork in the road), one leading to life in the savannah and mountains, another covering the earth and developing bigger and more complex brains.

Why do I rehash all this?

Why because there has been a significant breakthrough as of late. And it’s worth your time to learn about it. The results are far from in, and it may not prove to be what the author thinks it may be. But it has the scientific world of evolutionary biology and probably physics as well in a tizzy as other research facilities begin the wonderful process of devising experiments to test out the new hypothesis.

As people like myself, and hopefully you as well know, evolutionary theory does not purport to explain “how life began” a common mis-argument of the fundamentalist sort. Such a thing is called abiogenesis. Evolutionary theory has to do with how species change over time due to natural selection. However, a rather smart guy has offered an explanation of “how life began” in a sense, and it involves that 2nd law we talked about earlier.

He posits, by way of mathematical equations, that replication of cells may be a response to infusions of energy (the sun) into the primordial soup. In other words, life arises as a methodological answer to the desire to “even” out or reduce the heat of the energy. Because the 2nd law suggests that energy dissipates across the spectrum of the system seeking equanimity, replication of cells actually fosters that law England claims.

If this is true, then it is the underlying foundation of Darwin’s theory, and of course it means that life is what is to be expected in the universe, and not at all a rarity.

Of course, not everyone agrees that Jeremy England is right.

That is what science is all about. There is and will be, as I said, plenty of testing and experimentation to determine whether his hypothesis is correct. But it’s exciting news to anyone who, like I, is always wondering and asking “how and why”.

*Do read the article. It’s not that long.

Filed under: Astronomy, Evolution, fundamentalism, God, Human Biology, Inspirational, Non-Believers, Paleontology, Philosophy]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/12/from-whence-came-we/feed/4spiritmeadowtitles-in-evolutionary-biology-L-5dgnEbprimordial-soup_02https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/12/from-whence-came-we/I’m Not Nice, and I Don’t Intend to Changehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/H938kVtCtgw/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/08/im-not-nice-and-i-dont-intend-to-change/#commentsMon, 08 Dec 2014 15:05:04 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8914]]>When I read this article, it kind of all became clear. What article? This one.

It’s another of those that I have read recently that redirects the finger back at the liberal establishment for the perpetuation of racism.

Not in the way you damn real racists believe. Not in your stupid, we are post-racial and I’m not a racist, and if you play the race card, you, damn libtard, are. No, not in that way.

Some one suggested to me a week or so ago that liberals are the real racists, and she meant it. I admitted that that was a possibility in some sense, but in reality that would be an oxymoron of sorts. Liberal by definition excludes judging whole classes of people on the basis of some preconceived and wrong notion. Find me an overtly racist liberal and I’ll tell you to try again to go find me a liberal, cuz honey you ain’t got one.

I no more think all Republicans are scum-sucking whack jobs than I think all Democrats are destined for ambrosia and petal-laden avenues in heaven. I come closer to the “all” epitaph when it comes to white men, but I can rattle off several dozen to whom it doesn’t apply starting with my own husband to really mean that either.

Liberals, according to the psychological and sociological testing done by a myriad of smart people in a variety of institutions of higher learning, are people who are more adventurous when it comes to the great unknown, would rather try something new than use something old, see a symbiotic relationship that extends to all peoples of all places and includes animals and the environment. Our tribe is humanity, so we naturally don’t group people into cells of otherness. We like facts and logic. We have values but we know that facts and truth trump our parochial notions, and values can and should change as we accumulate more knowledge about ourselves and the world.

I’d be the first to tell you I didn’t start out that way. My parents weren’t particularly political, in fact my mother could not have told you a single fact about any important issue before the body politic. My father had opinions, but they were such a mishmash of conflicting direction, that I gained little insight into the world of conservative vs. liberal from him either. What he was was a racist, and he made no bones about it, though in his later years he learned the correct “words”, no longer using the “N” word and substituting “black” uttered with an guttural blah at the beginning that left little to the imagination about his true feelings.

He learned that a distant cousin’s child had married an NFL player who happened to be African-American and he took great delight in announcing “that’ my cousin” as the player ran down the field. It was not meant as praise nor as puffery. It amused him to be considered “family” with a person of color. It was a joke you see.

It took me getting to college and beyond, and later working and living in close proximity to people of color before I began to see the light of reason. At first it was a bit of a surprise to realize that all people pretty much are the same. African-Americans became my friends, my best friends in some cases, and lovers in a few too. They became mentors and people I came to admire for their values and principles and accomplishments. The point was, African-Americans were just like me, just like you, possessed of all the grandness and foibles that are the lot of humans.

I’ve always been good at seeing the bigger picture. I soon realized that Asians and Hispanics, and all the Pakistanis, and Arabs were all the same too. That happened a very long time ago, and I’ve learned a good deal since then. I’ve been, to a small degree, a part of the continuing struggle to bring justice and equality to this country. I’ve learned the ins and outs of strategy and the uses of the NAACP versus SNCC, versus the Panthers, and others as the means to the equality that we all see as necessary and inevitable.

What I have learned in my dotage is that being “nice” doesn’t work. I have talked to a lot of racists who tell me how they are not. They tell me about their black friends. They tell me that their black friends are like them. Bullshit. When you tell me how wonderful Ben Carson, Herm Cain, Alan West, Alan Keyes, and people like that are, and in the same breathe tell me that Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are racists, well, you need say no more. You have no black friends. You may have African-Americans whom you work beside, but trust me, they think you’re a racist and probably call you a cracker behind your back. If you are trying to impress them by telling them that you would sure vote for that Ben Carson fellow, then they surely know what you really are.

There is no nice about this ugliness in America. And those of us who are white, well we have to stop the “please don’t riot, be nice like Dr. King taught you.” We don’t run this show. We only have a right to offer ourselves as “hands” to do whatever tasks need tasking. We must encourage other white folks to speak up and be loud too, but our task is not to lead but to confront racists and poke them continuously with the stick of recognition.

The fact of the matter is that a travesty is occurring in this country and has been going on for EVER. Young black men die because police and others can get away with it. And they know this. We cannot fall for the explanations and excuses and the sanctimonious “advice” offered by people who don’t live this experience, and don’t deal with people who do.

It is NOT enough to agree that people shouldn’t destroy property, and sympathizing about what drives people to extremes. That is bait, set out to deflect the conversation away from injustice to excuses for why the police can’t be blamed for the poor upbringing of black boys. Keep focused on the reality of black men being abused daily on our streets. Keep focused on women being pushed around and assaulted by men because they can. Keep the focus where it belongs.

I don’t give a damn whether Bill Cosby’s career is ruined. I care about the women who have come out in droves to repeat the awful things he did to them. THEY ALL CAN’T BE LYING.

I don’t give a damn whether A woman lied about being raped. I care about the thousands who have been and who are afraid to face a condemning society that till tries to make it her fault.

I don’t give a damn what the grand jury testimony was in any of these cases. The fact remains a trial should have ensued because trials ensue in 99% of all the cases they hear as long as cops aren’t involved as potential defendants.

I don’t give a damn if many, or even most cops are good and risking their lives every day. They chose the career after all. I care about every damn dirty one who uses his/her power to push around others because they feel ineffectual everywhere else.

Some of you have told me that I’m not nice. You are supremely right. I’m not. I’m not nice to hate and injustice and inequality. I’m not nice to power used against people to keep them small and beaten down. I’m not special. I’m part of that great sea of decent people who mostly are nice, because they don’t want to offend. Well I want to offend. And I’m not going to be the least bit shy in telling you that you are a damned racist when you use the words and codes that announce it to the world.

It just happens to be the penalty you pay for watching that shit-“news” show Fox. You don’t even know, that based on what you do say, you might just as well use the “N” word, we all know what you mean.

And when more white people stop being nice, as the article suggested, well, then we might just cause you to go inside your tiny little mind and slam the door and avoid the public where you don’t belong. And we can get on with the work of building a decent society where people come first, ALL people, not just your lily-white group.

PS: And all that crap about “I am not against immigrants just ILLEGAL ones” (oh the crime!) We get that too. It’s just code you idiot for all your fears and your real cowardice to state the truth of your bigotry.

Filed under: Crap I Learned, crap I learned but wish I hadn't, Psychology, racism, Satire, Sociology]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/08/im-not-nice-and-i-dont-intend-to-change/feed/1spiritmeadowracist-kumbayahttps://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/08/im-not-nice-and-i-dont-intend-to-change/Thoughts on Living Dark in Americahttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/O6CtyMhCnNQ/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/12/05/thoughts-on-living-dark-in-america/#commentsFri, 05 Dec 2014 16:35:20 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8910]]>I’m not a white man, I’m a white woman. A few Black men used to tell me that white women and Black men shared a common victimization. They claimed that Black women were freer than both of us.

I was never sure that I bought that argument, and I certainly don’t buy that I share an equality of victimization with Black men or women.

But it does give me a certain empathy that comes easier for me than perhaps to the white male.

In my professional working days, I dated a number of police officers. A few were regular beat cops, a couple were Sergeants. I called a number of detectives and even one Deputy Chief good friends. Since this all occurred in one of the larger metropolitan forces in America, I think I know of what I speak.

Given that all this happened in Detroit, Michigan, once the “murder capital” wherein I worked with and under a list of rather well-known African-American police/ judges/politicians, I speak with some small knowledge of the realities of both crime and racism in America.

We are in the grips of a series of well-publicized incidents wherein Black folks have been killed by white police officers. This has happened in myriads of places, among forces that are more or less bigoted toward their policing communities. The evidence (1) or more properly, the allegations are all over the place. Some cases “seem” more clear-cut than others. People who are favorable to the police in one case are not necessarily favorable in other cases.

Whatever the truth may be in any case, there is a strong and clear perception that the system has failed the African-American community in large part. One example will suffice. Studies suggest that where marijuana is concerned, people use it pretty much in an equal amount racially. In fact, in some years, whites out use marijuana. Yet when you examine arrest rates, Blacks are arrested at stunningly higher rates. A look at the incarceration rates across the country speaks to the same conclusion.

Blacks are targeted. This has always been the case, and it continues to be the case. All the explanations and arguments cannot dissuade this conclusion no matter how hard people try. Deflections to “blacks commit more crimes against blacks than anybody else” are convenient diversions but nothing else. African-American parents teach their boys at an early age a whole series of behaviors in public that are required of them that are unthinkable to a white parent. Walking and driving while black is a real concept.

During my time practicing law, it was not unusual to be told by a client, “the police rolled up on us, stopped us, and said, ‘what are you doing in THIS neighborhood?'” No such thing is asked of a white kid.

The insensitivity to race in this country is stunning and shocking. The Right-wing continues to claim that we are a post racial country. And of course this is understandable when you are busily trying to dismantle government support systems, deny people the right to vote, and otherwise diluting the influence of dark skins in the decision-making process. Suddenly we don’t need to feed the hungry because they are poor and victimized by an unfair system that revolves around poor schools, lack of transportation choices, injustice in the courts, and so forth, but rather because they are “lazy” and have not learned the values of hard work and sacrifice that all good white children learn.

The point is there is a vested interest on the part of the Right to negate racism in America. Their champions become those handful of Negroes who crave the limelight and are willing to dance Bojangles tunes in return for being patted on the head and “considered” a real presidential candidate. African-Americans who stand up and declare the unfairness (as well as well-meaning liberals) are just “playing the race card”

Go to any right-wing blog, and read the comments. I regularly post “humor” pieces consisting of nothing but verbatim comments by people on topics of racial injustice. The same sick and ugly remarks pervade the hundreds that are posted.

Yet, I am daily told that I am the problem. I fail to understand the dangerous jobs our police people are doing, against criminals who are armed to the teeth. I fail to have any balance. I am always “playing the race card.”

Yes, I play it, because it fairly cries out to be played. This country is still ugly racist and you, Right wing, prove it every single day.

Here is a list of what is considered racist:

I’m not a racist. Well, you probably are if you made that statement. People who are sensitive to race and working to eliminate racism recognize that we are all racist or bigoted in ways we don’t even realize. We are always looking for the ways that we “assume” before thinking, “react” before thinking. We recognize our tendencies and work to eradicate them. To say you are not a racist is to utterly fail to even grasp this concept. You are deeply racist, and haven’t even begun the process.

We have a black president, and a black attorney general. As Chris Rock said, this is not an example of “progress”. There have been Black people for decades and centuries that were more than capable of being all these things. To suggest that white American has finally reached such a point, has little to do with “progress” from a Black perspective.

Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are black racists. There is no such thing as a black racist. It’s an oxymoron. Racism denotes the power to control a minority by a majority. A minority cannot be racist. Individuals of any race, creed, or gender can be bigots. Learn the difference.

Blacks need to raise their children to work hard and be law-abiding. They already do. What you are really saying, is that black people need to act white. You are not constrained as they are by crime-ridden neighborhoods, poor schools, lack of good transportation, poor government services, local merchants who take advantage of them though inferior products and high prices. When you have tried to fight though all that AND teach your child to be polite to slur-slinging authority figures and keep their hands out of their pockets and not play with toy guns, and not to walk down certain streets, and not to wear those tennis shoes, and not to wear your hat that way, and not to be out after 10 p.m., and not to ride in that sort of car, and, and, and, maybe you will get it.

Much has been made in recent months of mostly white men walking around in stores carrying their “I got a big dick” guns, in some male peacock display of misplaced masculinity. People forget that the Black Panthers did the same thing in California back in the 70’s and then Governor Ronnie Reagan called for new gun laws to stop this danger to the public. Black men with guns is dangerous. White men with guns is “protection to all”. Do you FUCKING SEE THE DIFFERENCE?

One day we will look back on all this (we being future generations no doubt) and see all the hypocrisy. A study just confirmed what has been known for a number of years. The bulk of the “tea party movement” was born, bred and financed by the Kochs. They personally don’t give a damn about all your religious issues, but they do find it a good thing to have your mind occupied by gays and affirmative action, by “socialist” boogie men behind every government program designed to help those less fortunate. They and those like them are behind the misdirection that you live with.

As long as you blame others for your shit-life ( or at least it would be a whole lot better if I didn’t have to support THEM), then you are not blaming them–the people with all the money and with all the power. They continue to reform this country into an oligarchy where the rich have everything and everyone works for them in some sick Ayn Randian dystopian nightmare. And you play your part by calling for free markets and free guns, and worrying about who is marrying who.

Get a clue. Markets have never been free, and the Kochs and their ilk don’t want free markets, they want them rigged as they now are to favor them. They want international markets to be open to their products and they will abuse and exploit workers worldwide and do so with impunity. They are intent on reducing you to no more than a Bangladeshi sweat-shop worker. They don’t care about your old age, or your health. As long as we continue to breed, there will always be enough. Platitudes are all you actually get from paid politicians who say we just have to get back to the good old days of hard work and sacrifice–you know, like you and your parents. Stop supporting these lazy no-accounts. That ain’t racism, just good old American pride.

Bullshit.

As they sit with their December tans in San Moritz and laugh over martinis at the gullibility of their “tea bagger” supporters, while you continue to talk about “respecting our police” and calling young a young kid who may have snatched a few cigarillos a “thug”. Yeah, continue doing your “job”. The rich laugh all the way to the bank.

PS: all this shit applies to brown skins too.

(1) Given that almost none of these cases has resulted in a prosecution, we can only surmise what the evidence is. Grand jury testimony is not evidence nor proof of anything, having been untested by cross-examination or subject to objection by the other side. This is no “other side” in grand jury proceedings.

Let’s be blunt. I can believe that people think these things but not stupid enough to voice them.

Let’s be brutal. I can’t believe you can be on the Far Right and be this unable to even see how stupid what you say sounds.

I mean, seriously. Be a flaming conservative. Hate people by the train-load full. But no finesse in at least pretending otherwise to the world? Do you have to Rambo deliver your stupid?

I’m admonished from time to time to be gentle, to be kinder, to be more willing to assume that people are NOT the image that they so studiously work to portray. Forgive me if I don’t have time for niceties. It’s the looks, acts, talks, walks, lika. . . . Am I supposed to assume otherwise? Why are you entitled to the benefit of the doubt?

I had two fairly long conversations this week with idiots. I am not gonna quote verbatim because that would be boring, but I’ll give you a good idea of what transpired. Names have been changed to protect the children of these bastions of extreme stupid.

One of the “discussions” involved immigration. Peggy Sue was against all that stuff. Peggy Sue said the key word was “illegal”, in fact Peggy Sue just made the whole process simple,

“They are illegals,” she said in exasperation, “they have entered the country ILLEGALLY.”

“So, what’s that mean to you? I mean illegal is a word that describes some state of mind you have. It’s illegal to drive over the speed limit, to not pay your fair share of taxes, to litter. What does entry across the border without papers mean to you?”

“THEY CROSSED ILLEGALLY,” she shouted.

I get that, besides breaking a law, which we all do, why does that bother you so much? You see I see the term “illegals” as a code word for (a) they are brown and I don’t like that, (b) they will take our jobs, (c) they will change our way of life. I see that as racist, coming to you from Fox Noise and their hate machine.

After a few hours, I got this response:

“I’ll make this clear. They are breaking the law, and it’s important to know who crosses our borders because they may be carrying diseases to infect our children, they may be criminals, or they may be terrorists. I’m not a racist. The only racists are liberals playing the race card,” she suggested in her best recall of what Fox said.

Tens of thousands of children are born in this country every year. Do you know which ones will be criminals or get diseases, or become terrorists? If you get a new neighbor do you know this? Your neighbor is not legally required to vaccinate their children. Why do you impose this on others? Did you know that South American countries on a whole have better rates of vaccination than this country? Are there ANY verifiable reports of terrorists crossing the southern border? Do you worry about the northern border ever?

Jack Sprinkle popped in at that point with “you’re wordy. You baffle with bullshit.”

Thanks Jack, that certainly enlightened the fly on the wall.

“Typical liberal. If you disagree with them it’s because you watch Fox News!” shouted Peter Pooch. And then to emphasize the point, he added, “I watch Fox and I’m proud of it.”

Later, we gave thanks for Thanksgiving, brought to us by all those hard-working migrants across the land who pick your food so you can celebrate. Thank you Jesus, for this food. Jesús, the worker, says da nada.

FACEPALMS ALL AROUND at that one. Yeah, Peggy Sue they do. Oh triple sigh.

We move on to Ferguson.

Peter Pooch is all to excited to discuss this one.

Michael Brown is described as “a criminal, a thug, a giant, or better yet Giant Thug, a 6’5″ 270 pound charging cigar stealing police attacking criminal “. It’s all summed up this way:

“Giant Thug robs storeAttacks police officerGets shot for itCop was in the right”

Um except for the fact, that the Officer was the same height, so giant is perhaps a bit much. Except that he was never convicted of a thing, so “thug and criminal” is not correct. Except that there is conflicting evidence as to whether he attacked the officer. Your conclusion that the “cop was right” is your conclusion, not the facts there.

Peter Pooch was not done, “I will take the word of a police officer over a known criminal any day of the week.”

No doubt you will, and that disqualifies you Pete from sitting on a jury anywhere in the US of A. Got that?

It got worse:

If the black community wants to get ahead in this world they need to learn about education they need to learn that the leaders they have now such as Rev. Al have been lying to them for many years There may be some racism in this country but it’s very little compared to air to 50 years ago we have black senators black congressman black police officers black fireman black politicians by the way have a black president which it entire group of white people voted for There are more black racist than there are white racist these days

I gotta hand it to ya Pete, you don’t miss a beat of the Fox News distortion. And the African-American community thanks you for all that good advice on how to be white. I’m sure they will have family discussions and implementation strategies soon employed now that they understand how to be as you wish them to be.

African-American friends I have don’t listen to L Sharpton and And they teach their children to respect the laws of this country they teach their children to get an education and they teach their children to have respect for themselves I don’t riot and they don’t loot and I don’t attack police officers they have respect for each other for themselves for the walk

Which I take to mean that Peter Pooch’s African-American friends, are just like him. I can imagine them all calling Michael Brown a “giant thug”. But then I snap back into reality. African-American “friends” my ass.

As I was telling my husband, I’m not a really nice person. I sorta like poking sticks at caged animals if you get the metaphor. But it’s awfully sad too. Knowing that racism is so much a part of our daily lives still. At least in large parts of our country. Such conversations no doubt occur down here in New Mexico, but in much more isolation I believe.

I don’t meet many in my daily life here.

There are so many errors. The conclusion that is held by so many uber right wingers that liberals and Blacks are the real racists today, because they don’t understand what the word racist means. Pretending that whites are the new “oppressed” “race”. Pretending that racism can be masked by “criminal” and “disease” and “illegal”.

Going about daily lives sanctimoniously, because you are “Christian” and “good” and “law-abiding”. Manipulating the world to reflect how you want it to be because it is what you envision as safe.

Life is mean, ugly, dirty, and freakin’ complicated. There are no answers that are definitive about most anything. There are things that are better or worse than some alternative. Life is unstable. It always was always will be. If you find a place of quiet, where life is serene, consider yourself lucky. Seek out good people and cling to them for the crazies are numerous and will drive you insane otherwise.

People are people everywhere and every time. There are not bad people, only bad situations that some find themselves in. Some of the fault is theirs, a lot of it is not. You’re not better just different. God favors no one. You don’t have any right to anything, you have only the privilege of certain advantages. If you spent half the time helping others attain your advantages instead of trying to protect your stuff, we’d all be better off by twice.

If it sounds like hate, it usually is. If you start using the word them, you are hating somebody. Stop it.

Get over yourself. You’re gonna die and be forgotten, in probably no longer than three generations.

Smell a flower. Drink a glass of wine. Watch a sunset. Smile at a stranger.

I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s. I went to a normal county school. Bond issues always passed. Our schools were modern and clean. The books were up-to-date and in good repair. We had a lab and a gym, a football field, a cafeteria. All the normal accouterments. Our parents were mostly factory workers, many probably hadn’t graduated high school, but most probably had. What did they know? What did I know?

How does one judge one’s school when one has never known another?

So I matriculated through, and thought I got the normal A- education, not quite the private school, but wasn’t I one of those American students who set the bar for the rest of the world? I thought so.

I remember as I prepared to go to college having a pamphlet entitled something to the effect: “The one hundred books every college freshman should have read.” I had read almost none. I set up rectifying that, but I don’t think I read more than about six.

I majored in political science and dabbled in philosophy and whatever else fancied me. I took a writing course, but never a formal literature class as I recall.

At some point I realized that I was not well versed in literature per se. It comes from reading books which explain an emotion or an event with reference to another well-known classic and, well, I seemed never to have read it or understood the comparison therefore. A lot of fairly heavy academic subjects often reference the hero or heroine of a fictional account to explain someone else. I usually missed those too.

It was then that I began to suspect that perhaps I had not been well taught in high school.

That’s an easy explanation and serves to put the blame squarely on another set of shoulders.

In part it might be true. I don’t know, but surely no English teacher I had in my youth ever managed to find the right button with me. I read a ton of fiction as a child, but most all of it was cheap trash that was not notable either by title or author. I got most of it from the school library. An only child has to fill some hours every week doing something and reading was my escape when the time of day or situation presented no friend to wile away the hours with.

In part it was probably due to parents who were not readers. To my knowledge my mother never read a book, at least that I ever saw. My father confined his reading to the 25¢ paperback novel about the west or about the war. There were no “great novels” in our home. It’s little wonder I had no idea what one was.

Along came law school, and there was no time for fiction. I read day and night of course but not fiction. And then there were other interests over the years. I read deeply into paleontology, the origins of man, and astronomy, the origins of the universe. That later turned into a deep interest in Christianity which blossomed into a return to academia. Have you picked up the theme here? Origins. I read tons of science fiction for several years.

So reading was never the issue, but fiction fell by the way side, and I found in my fifties that gosh, I was pretty illiterate when it came to American authors and most of Europe’s best. I had read most of Twain, most of Dickens. I’d read Moby Dick, and a few others. I’d read a fair number of more popular authors like Leon Uris. I read all of Shakespeare. I read Homer. I read Thucydides and parts of Tacitus. I’d read parts of Aristotle, and all of Plato, and most of the Greek playwrights.

I had not read Chaucer or Flaubert, Proust, Cervantes, Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Salinger, or Hesse, or Conrad, Vonnegut, Plath or Dreiser, Sinclair, Cather. Oh the list was and is quite long. I’ve read most of these now, at least one of their novels, and a host of others. I’ve seen so brilliantly what real writing is all about.

The list remains long in this late attempt to catch up to where I think I should be. And in the end, it falls upon me, only me. I can push off some blame for not being directed as a child, but surely I decided as an adult to spend my time on this rather than that. And perhaps that was not wrong, so much as it led me to these beliefs and not some others.

Who is to say which would be better? I’m convinced in some real sense that reading some of these authors at 20 is not profitable. It takes a lot of living to extract the value of say a Salinger or a Plath don’t you think?

If we can think beyond the tip of our nose, then it is on each of us how much we will decide to benefit from the wisdom of those that have walked before us. Hermann Hesse says that wisdom cannot be taught. One can convey knowledge but wisdom? No. And he is right. We do not learn wisdom from these greats, but we gain insight and perspective, and these are, to me, some of the building blocks of wisdom.

At my age there is little else to strive for, except to be known as wise. Today a nice enough fellow suggested that I wrote long replies to appear brilliant and cover up the bullshit of what I was saying. I think that not true actually, I speak in carefully constructed sentences to be properly understood. But of course, flowery prose does have a way of making shit smell better. So there was a point to his statement if alas he only meant to dismiss my remarks with mean-pointed barb.

Still, words are the tools of my craft, and I admit to being a bit in love with the playing with them. Yet, in reading so many marvelous for-the-ages authors, I’m reminded at how much wisdom is offered if not always received. And I’m the worse for it for taking as long as I have to discover what I have missed.

Nothing to do now, save to read on. Read on, my captain.

PS: there are enumerable lists of “The 100 books everyone should read”. They are probably all equally good and bad. But they do offer a guideline. I’d stick with newer models if I were you, since the older one’s are decidedly western-centric.

You can find this on Facebook. My map is pretty bare compared to a lot I’ve seen. Many people have visited nearly every state in the union. I’m not especially a joyful traveler, i.e., I don’t really care much for the process. After the initial excitement of “starting” I’m pretty much happy to be drugged and awakened at the destination. I find “sightseeing” tiresome. This may in fact be genetic or at least experientially induced, because as a child we traveled hardly ever. We traveled to upstate Michigan and a couple of times to see relatives in Canada but that’s it. My father often remarked that “he had seen all the traveling he ever needed in the war.” So that was that.

So I have seldom traveled for pleasure, but rather for a reason. Business mostly or moving.

That has not stopped me from having rather definite opinions about most places, having seen them or not, or having at best tasted of their airports or highways and little else but a place to placate a growling stomach.

I rather assume that most of my impressions are wrong, at least the ones that are based on the aforementioned.

However, I shall relate some of them.

Shall we start with those I know best?

MICHIGAN: born there, raised there. Flint to be exact. Lived in Detroit for many years as a working adult, already spiraling in major decline. Flint nothing more than the poorest of step-sisters. If Buffalo is the armpit of America, Flint is a dirty factory town with almost no redeeming qualities. When traveling, to say you were from Flint brought stares of non-comprehension, to say Detroit brought an instant compassionate grimace. Full of lovely trees and forests in the upper portions and lots of lakes. Good places to raise a family but know that everyone north and west of Detroit hates the city for sucking the lifeblood of the state into its hungry jaws of need. Upper peninsula is like another country with more affinity for Wisconsin than down-staters. Cold and snowy in the winter, hot and humid in the summer and nearly always partly cloudy which used to piss me off as a young girl chasing a tan. Would rather push a hot poker in my eye that ever live there again. Seriously. You are not a true mid-western state, and you are way too unsophisticated to be an Eastern state. I do know a lot of fine people who live there and I don’t know why they do. Provincial as one would expect. If you must visit, stick to Ann Arbor and East Lansing.

CONNECTICUT: Lived there two years. Loved it immensely. New England is the place where it all began. Where constitutions were hidden in the hollows of trees dating from the 1660’s. Where cemeteries host the remains of revolutionary soldiers. Where a day trip can take your through five states and back home. Where the Atlantic is but a short drive. Where I-95 covers in part the Old Post Road that brought mail from the newly instituted Washington D.C. to Boston. Where the lights of NYC are but an hour’s train ride away. Where David Letterman lives and Paul Newman did, and Katherine Hepburn and Eugene O’Neill. It is the setting for A Long Day’s Journey into Night. Where houses bear signs designating their date of build in the 1700’s, and the whole place wreaks of history. What’s not to love? Where you realize that lots of street and county names in Michigan originated from. Home of Yale. Cosmopolitan as it gets.

IOWA: Lived there twelve years. Hated the very thought of it. Where dumb football players originated. Where one of your best friends can be a self-employed high school drop-out who is a man of all trades and would be unrecognizable cleaned up and another of your best friends is a retired college professor and can discourse on a variety of subjects with ease. It’s a ying-yang state, proving that to be rural is not to necessarily be a bumpkin. Proving that wholesome farming people are some of the best you will ever meet always willing to lend a hand. Living near a town that is unincorporated where everyone knows your name and nobody is pretentious. Going to a church where there are a dozen retired and current professors and even the CEO of one of the two major hospitals. Where a first class college town exists but an hour away and art thrives in the hearts and minds of people who live in small towns. Truly a state not to be believed by the average person. Just don’t go west, where it all falls apart and becomes exactly what you would expect–red neck nuts who vote for Steve King.

NEW MEXICO: Lived here two and one-half years and probably for the rest of my life. Visited once for two weeks back in the early 90’s. Realized it was special. Mountains everywhere, most all raised from volcanic activity. Lava is abundant in some places, black rock protruding in forested hills and mountain trails. Some of the most magnificent scenery, certainly to rival Arizona and Oregon and Washington State. Deserts and mesas painted in desert colors. Turquoise skies and red clay sands. In the North and West the Native populations are prevalent, in the South we are filled with a wonderful mix of Hispanic peoples, most from Mexico. The mix of Native and Mexican brings its own special Southwestern flair to decorating, cooking and architecture that is truly New Mexican. It embraces the cultural heritage of its peoples like no other state I believe. Anglos know they tread on land that belonged to others and they are truly blessed guests welcomed to a land that was not savaged by the greed that faced Texas and California, because nobody saw anything here worth pursuing here. It’s roots are deep as New Englands and probably more obvious with petroglyphs and carved declarations abounding on its cliffs. Spanish conquistadors claimed the land for the Church and for the Empire of Spain “Here was the General Don Diego de Vargas, who conquered for our Holy Faith and for the Royal Crown all of New Mexico at his own expense, year of 1692.” etched in the rock at El Morro.

TEXAS: Been to Houston and Dallas. Not especially impressed. Traveled to El Paso more than a dozen times. El Paso and Las Cruces share a television network and weather. Lots of our commercials refer to locations in El Paso. So El Paso at least doesn’t seem exactly Texan to me. Still, I don’t like crossing the state line. People drive like maniacs. State is just too damn big. Sign not long after entering Texan from New Mexico, says something like Beaumont 856 miles. That is just too far. Traveled through the handle of Texas from Oklahoma. Open, boring land. You just have to wonder at a state that can produce a Stockman, a Gohmert and a Perry in one generation. The water must be bad. Still I have some fine friends who live there, and I wish them well. Some dude who sells cars has his mother hawking for him–old bat who says, “he’s such a good boy”. This to a man in his 60’s. Doesn’t speak well for sanity there.

GEORGIA: Confine yourself to the airport and you will be fine. I am deeply concerned that venturing too far from it will lead to your being sucked into the vortex that will spit you out in stupid Alabama where all thought goes to die.

ALABAMA: Already said all that needs be said.

MINNESOTA: People talk funny. If there are aliens, they left their kids here. They elected a wrestler as governor. They elected Michele Bachmann. They were the real site of the television show Fargo, which tells you just how confused they really are. They may have 10,000 lakes but every one of them suckers is frozen over now. They live there by choice. The capital of stupid has this state in its sights.

WYOMING: Not to be confused with Montana, but always is. Open skies. Forever ruined because Dick (the Dick) Cheney claims it as home. If ever a mother should have thrown that chick from the nest, this was the child that should have landed on his head. Well, actually he probably did. Think cowboys and cattle and the women who attach themselves to a man wearing boots with cow shit through the house. Ain’t a pretty sight is it? Look up and things are much better.

DELAWARE: Just a throughway to other places. Nothing to see here folks, move along.

KENTUCKY: a place only horses and drunks can love.

OHIO: You have to get really high to forget you are in this god-forsaken waste of good space. It has nothing to recommend it. Two demerits for housing that atrocious university which clings to “THE” as its claim to importance.

COLORADO: Home to aging hippies and fundamentalists. What a mix. Watch where you walk. A good place to buy pot.

CALIFORNIA: Psychopathic and schizophrenic at the same time. Everything and nothing. New York on steroids, or the new laid back New Sophisticates. Has it all with a place for every value or moral turpitude invented by humans on the fast track to nowhere. But they all think they are going somewhere. There’s the rub. And the charm.

NEVADA: only if you gamble.

MAINE: “Let’s go to sight-see in Maine,” said nobody ever. They re-elected a vile and stupid governor, which means their synapses have long frozen over.

NEW HAMPSHIRE: Like to think of themselves as independents but they just switch back and forth every two years because they talk funny too and can’t understand each other.

FLORIDA: shaped like a penis. And they think like one too. Visit soon. Climate change will make it history.

MISSISSIPPI: has a very strange and sick relationship with the letter S. and I, and P for that matter. Avoid it. Fifty-two percent of its citizens cannot spell it.

Filed under: Essays, Humor, Satire, States on Parade Tagged: states of the US]]>https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/11/21/livin-life-across-america/feed/5spiritmeadowhttps://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/11/21/livin-life-across-america/The Industry of Controversyhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/yGSu/~3/VyZmW5PBKhY/
https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/the-industry-of-controversy/#commentsThu, 20 Nov 2014 16:26:26 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8892]]>Making broad generalizations about anything is usually dangerous business, and this is no exception. I’ll state my belief and then, well assume I’m probably wrong.

From the perspective of a normal lifespan, it appears to me that political discourse has changed. I seem to recall in my youth, when politics played but a minor interest across my frontal lobes, that the one thing that would kill a politician was to be caught in a real lie.

The lucky journalist who could ferret out the scheming liar was rewarded with a bi-line and the unfortunate recipient of his/her research retired to pick daisies in their garden while shunning the public forevermore.

Today, the lie is revered for its ability to start the firestorm of controversy.

Let me explain with an example my husband once used in a piece he once wrote.

Man takes a loaf of bread for another man. (the fact).

Newspaper 1: Desperately poor man is forced to steal a loaf of bread from wealthy financier in order to feed his family.

Newspaper 2: Lazy local man steals a loaf of bread from beloved philanthropist to feed his dependent family members, none of whom work.

Although I believe that journalism has fallen off a cliff, it probably hasn’t. Emotion has always sold better than simple facts. While the above suggests that “both sides” do it, we know rather definitively that they don’t do it equally. However, THEY BOTH DO IT.

The example the Contrarian uses was from some years ago. It was reported that a polling of British citizens suggested that about 1/3 supported the monarchy, about 1/3 did not, and about 1/3 did not care at all. Depending on what you wished to portray, it was reported by the media as “most people are happy with the monarchy” or “most people are not happy with the monarchy”. The “do not care” is used by either side to push their meme.

It’s not hard these days to find a number of people making the point that things are infinitely worse in our political drama called Washington, because the press has determined that all that interests them is controversy. If you want to get on camera and say that the other side sucks eggs and is the latest great installment of totalitarian governance, well, you will get that microphone. If you wish to fuel the hate, by all means, spout off.

That drives up ratings apparently.

The media does not cause the hate, but they do nothing to stop it. They watch the alley fight with fascination, and encourage it from the sidelines, occasionally dodging the odd piece of mud that flies from the melee.

Somewhere along the line, asking the push back question became “partisanship”. So anything goes. Any statement is left hanging out there to an increasingly ignorant viewing audience who doesn’t even know that the push back question exists let alone what the answer might be.

This became clear this morning when Mika Brzezinski pointed out about the “Bill Cosby controversy” that the news people seemed apologetic to even ask Cosby the questions. Indeed they are. The icon of comedy is somehow untouchable at “his age” much like the genius of Woody Allen is guard against his possible pedophilia activities.

It works as the politicians intend for one reason. They know to whom they speak. They believe fully in their heart of hearts (no matter how much they flatter and pander when called upon), that most people are ignorant as dirty water left over from a pig bath. They lie, knowing that the media won’t push back, and the listener has neither the time nor the interest in determining whether they speak a lie or truth. The lie works, and the media is complicit in the drama.

A guy called Gruber said that the ACA passed in part because the American people are stupid and don’t know the first thing about economics or insurance. What Gruber said is hardly news, most any professor across the country would agree, by simply plugging in their field of interest–art history, quantum mechanics, or marine biology. Yet the hue and cry from the Rightie-Tighties was swift and loud. The very folks who depend on stupid were outraged that anyone should say such a vile thing about the American people!

The fact of the matter is that all these people, be they politicians, journalists (I use the term loosely of course), scientists of any flavor, doctors, lawyers, (insert anyone with a decent college degree and a “professional” job) thinks exactly the same. That is why my friends, that the average working stiff has nothing but contempt deep down in his heart for any of them “ed-u-kay-ed” types, with their snooty knowledge. Gruber said it out loud and for that he can be condemned, especially if you can twist it into some political advantage.

The President contemplates using his executive authority to manage the immigration laws,attempting to fix the worst problems with limited resources. The GOP screams that he is shredding the constitution. When it is pointed out to some of those who take up the banner that executive orders have been used by presidents since Washington and frankly on issues of even greater important such as desegregating the entire national school system or incarcerating tens of thousands of Japanese citizens, the chatterers proclaim–it’s not the numbers it’s the subject!

But the opening salvos made no mention that executive orders were legal and had been used since the inception of the nation, they simply started screaming about destroying the Constitution. They made it about EO’s themselves. They count on the fact that those who are listening don’t know about EO’s, and will start puppeting the “shredding” remark. And they count on them not listening to other sources that might inform them otherwise. They count on this stupidity. It is their ace in the hole.

We can shut down the government, we can sue the President, we can filibuster each and every thing proposed to lighten the burden on the middle class, we can deny millions health care coverage, all in the name of “stopping this evil man” because we can support our decision by any frightful lie, and know that neither the poor saps we gush at nor the supposedly free press will point out our lies. Nobody is listening, nobody cares.

The only thing that matters is blaming somebody other than me. And everybody who doesn’t want to be blamed is surely able to find a suitable scapegoat. And the press? Well, try looking at the FCC and their willingness to allow the consolidation of radio, television and newspapers into fewer and fewer hands, and then you might get a clue why journalism is nothing more than fluff pieces designed to entertain rather than inform. That would be a start.

**title stolen from my husband

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https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2014/11/17/in-the-age-of-secessionist-gabble/#commentsMon, 17 Nov 2014 18:25:35 +0000http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=8887]]>What this country needs is a constitutional convention.

Well, yes of course we do, but of course we can’t have one because a shockingly large percentage of our population is tone deaf to rationality. They are out there, in states spread across the South largely, talking about whether the only answer to America’s perceived woes is SECESSION.

Yes, they actually talk about it. Threaten it, as Bud Lite dribbles down their chins followed by a hearty belch. Yep, best just cut them heathen atheistic commie lovers off at the knees. See how they fare without old Alabama to carry their weight!

Surely I jest.

Surely.

Given our political climate, a constitutional convention would be a farce and more likely to produce a new installment of Dr. Seuss than a working framework for governance, but hey a woman can dream can’t she?

Like Lennon said,

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one

The truth is though, that while a number of folks (nobody has original thoughts any more remember? The last original thought was either René and his “I think therefore. . . .” or Julius Caesar, “et tu, brute?”, I can’t remember which) think that a rewrite would be useful, damn few of us would agree on what that should be. But if limited to only rational people (as I define them), heck, it could be pretty good exercise in self-governance.

Now such a notion verily causes the blood pressure of some folks to skyrocket to Orion’s Belt, (which as you know is only an “appearance” of location given our planetary view and would look way difference say from Arcturus where that configuration of stars appears as a lady giving birth to a kangaroo), but hey, nobody ever didn’t say that I don’t like to rile the sensibilities of all those I love and don’t respect much.

If we can just for a second think of the Founding Men (the women never do count do they?), as human beings and not godlets from Olympus God’s holy throne room, then it would seem obvious that from time to time a new one is in order. Seriously, do you think a bunch of rather rich men who were pissed at being treated like country bumpkins and decided they could do a damn good job of running the show alone, REALLY thought their bit of parchment would one day rule over 350 millions of folk across a land that spread to the Pacific and then some?

Did they contemplate nuclear energy, moon-landings or coco puffs? How about plastics and rubber? Who the hell could predict a haircap Donald Trump for lordly sakes, or that we would call eating as many hotdogs as you can stuff in your craw in 3 minutes as a sport?

Of course not.

So, it seems prudent (people actually named their daughters that at one time–Prudence, come hither and beat the rug!), to revisit the efficacy of some of the words and so forth from time to time, no?

I don’t mean to go word by word or even article by article, for that is stuffy and dusty work indeed, and I’m more of a fly-by artist, so I’ll just hit the high spots of you don’t mind, (and even if you do).

First off, lets get rid of this Federalism stuff. A quaint and I might say quite useful system when a person might walk 20 miles in a day, or a horse run itself into the ground at say 50 miles. Even in the days of the great iron horse that puffed its way up the Rockies and down the other side to visit nirvana (i.e. California otherwise known as THAT SPACE BELONGING TO THE MEXICANS WHO LIVED THERE AND CALLED IT HOME FOR A COUPLE OF HUNDRED YEARS BEFORE WE GOT THERE AND “DISCOVERED” IT).

It made sense when government was so very far away from it’s citizenry to have aN up close and cozy arrangement of local governments which would administer all the basics as only up close and personal can. Since Merika was all new and shiny, why not experiment across the land with methodologies of state legislatures, election cycles, funding for roads and schools, and where to build cemeteries? I mean it made sense.

Along came the telephone, the plane, and the Inter-tubes and well, all that changed. We are all instantly connected, to a degree that some of us find down right too personal. Differing methods for elections, different requirements to matriculate through the state-sponsored good citizen course (public schools), and so forth only serve to piss off travelers and and mobile populations. We after all, more and more of us at least, live in something like ten different places from birth to death, and many of us a lot more, encompassing several states. Change in the sense of how basics are accomplished is just a pain.

I say we retain “states” merely for nostalgia and for college and professional sports reasons. The rest–belongs to centralized government. I still retain the right to say that good grief, at least I live in New Mexico and not Alabama, and I trust that will always be true.

Second, this 2nd amendment thing is has gotten all goofed up. Once upon a time virtually EVERYONE got that the point was a kind of old-fashioned protection against the Crown of England, like the “no housing of troops” which no doubt is just as outdated and quaint. States, particularly those in the South who based their economic success so much on owning humans, wanted to be sure they had the right to raise state militias should the need arise (they pretty much saw the hand-writing on the wall, I’ll give them that). The Feds also, having no good way to pay a standing army, and being a bit nervous about such a beast, wanted to be able to call upon the state’s militias in order to put down any future “revolutionary” upstarts such as they themselves have been.

None of which exists today quite obviously.

Please point out to me in the Federalist Papers where Monroe or Hamilton talked about the right of every individual to maintain the latest in firepower in case he/she/or increasing it/ needed to take up arms against the government for “treading on me” in their wild and crazy minds?

It is plain silly to suggest that a band of chamo-laden drunks with bandolier clips is going to take down the firepower of the US NAVY, US ARMY, US AIR FORCE, US MARINES. Seriously, such “patriots” need Freud more than they need another gun to pet.

In my college days when I was chock full of myself, I remember studying the electoral college and reading all about the pros and cons of such a strange configuration. Because the easy answer was “get rid of it”, I remember making the case for keeping it, because it sounded much more academic and therefore “smart” to me. When I was a child, I spake as a child. So get rid of it. It makes no sense.

We have federal elections. There should be a national federal election day, where EVERYONE gets off. We should make all voting laws FEDERAL. We should make it as easy as possible for as many as possible to exercise their vote. People should be penalized (lightly but real) for not doing their duty.

We could still maintain the House or Representatives, but we would elect all representatives “at large”, based on population within the state. Federal “districts” drawn by independent bodies without regard to political party would be arbitrarily assigned by lot. Those would be your constituents. If you win re-election you would likely get a different group of citizens to represent.

All elections would be limited to 6 months of campaigning and all funding would be federal apportioned equally to all candidates.

Rewrite “reasonable search and seizure” to be specific–spell it out. Same with “high crimes and misdemeanors”, and the same with “cruel and unusual punishment”. All these fuzzy statements take up entirely too much of our court time. Well, except for the high crimes thingie. Just stamp a “just say no” when it comes to Republicans and their pouting.

Reparations to all native peoples, and all those held previously in bondage.

Limit terms for all federal judicial posts, and require that during their tenure in office they may not participate in partisan politics of any sort. Establish commissions that determine when any judge is ineligible to sit on a pending case due to “conflict of interest”.

A definition of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This should include that the government is a compact of the people, by the people and for the people, and includes basic human rights–adequate food, lodging, education, health care, and a living wage. This the government should strive to provide.

Only humans have free speech. Person is defined as a living being capable of survival outside the womb, even with artificial assistance.

Religion is a personal matter and should be sustained by those who desire to engage in organized faith systems.. Churches are not exempt from taxes. Religious opinions should play no part in our political rhetoric, because all humans are free to believe what they wish and not be affected by another persons faith or lack of it.

Before any law discriminates against another group of people, the highest of bars must be met. It is presumed that all are equal and entitled to equality of rights.

All persons defined as human people have full integrity over the use of their own body. Laws may only inhibit one’s control over their own life to the degree that it threatens the integrity of another life as herein defined. Pursuit to this article, one has the legal right to terminate one’s own life, or a life that has not yet reached “person-hood”. People who have reached the age of majority (18) may ingest what they wish, as long as they are not a threat to the well-being of others.